the real horror is a months or years long time loop. no speedrunning your torture here. you have to sit with the consequences of your actions for a loooong time before the release of knowing the consequences and actions have been erased.
but oh, all the actions and consequences are gone. those relationships you built? empty. you can never build them again without the constant guilt of knowing that it’s not as real the second, third, thirtieth time when you already know all their secrets and they none of yours.
but you can’t hide. you can’t isolate yourself because what if this is the time the loop breaks and then what? years gone by of missed chances with people who have changed you a thousand times and now circumstances have changed. you can never build back what was washed away by your own inaction. they’ll never be able to meet you like they did the first time if you don’t choose to meet them the first time every time
listen up chucklefucks, i just gotta say. I’m not defending zir, but I’m sad zie deactivated. Like, i get that trauma lasts a long time and the good stuff is maybe easy to forget?? so maybe it’s just like that. And my beloved mutual @/pompeyspuppygirl made a post about zir clout chasing behavior, which is pretty shitty behavior if it’s true (and if we’re canceling someone it had better be pretty severe). anyways now that zie’s gone pompeyspuppygirl said it was okay to make this post (again, thanks ppg everyone go follow her –really everyone in this whole drama is worth a follow)
ANYways yeah zie was my mutual and like, reblogged a lot my smaller posts. (that isn’t to discredit what my mutual pompeyspuppygirl is saying about zie clout chasing ofc). AND idk zie was always reblogging art from new and undiscovered artists and reblogging donation posts (which if you don’t know is really bad if you’re trying to clout chase…) (again, though, ppg is my mutual i believe her.) and like, remember on valentines day i tried to blaze zir posts and zie told me to stop because zie didn’t want the posts to go viral? (but again ppg is my mutual and has a lot of proof in the Google doc I’m not trying to disprove that I’m just saying what else I know)
Idk, like i feel like a lot of people loved zir’s blog a while back, bc like zie DID make some good posts?? So idk why everybody’s acting like they aren’t even a little bit sad.,. like ngl this feels like maybe all the reasonable people left to Twitter and all the Twitter refugees who love drama came here??? shdfhhdhdhdhdh haha but idk…look idk, i just, julie i do miss you. idk. more thoughts later sorry I’m getting worked up shshs
Here’s the original text because honestly this is impressive and I don’t think it fully hits unless you know the Shakespeare.
okay. listen. if you ever find yourself falling into a new ideological circle, pay attention. if you notice that you’re among people who define themselves as part of an “in-group” with a pre-prepared human “enemy” to constantly rail against—if everyone fantasizes about the mental state of these loathsome monsters, if they participate in witch hunts or (perhaps worse) poke bears and court harassment on purpose to comfort each other over—get the fuck out. you haven’t been enlightened to some grand conspiracy, there are no evil “enemies” or “degenerates” trying to rip apart the fabric of society, and you do not have the moral duty to “enlighten” anyone to whatever you think the “truth” is. it’s neither safe nor normal to spend hours of your day fighting with strangers on the internet
a lot of people wear this shit like a badge of honor, but it’s also not normal to hide your “in-group” status as a form of martyrdom, relishing when the “enemy” slips up around you. it’s comforting in the moment, but in the long run, you’re alienating yourself from the world outside of your bubble. the more you alienate yourself, the more vulnerable and lonely you become, and the harder it is to reject the comfort of belonging to the “in-group”
i’m writing this from the perspective of someone who grew up in a cesspool of awful, cult-like rural churches—which is its own situation—but i see similar shit happening in online communities all the time, both within and 800 miles outside of my own ideological principles. yes, every toxicass radfem i block seems to be trapped in a version of this vicious cycle, but i also see it happening in random queer circles and niche fandom communities. no one is immune, not even me. i’ve watched people fall into this shit and never make it out. be careful
a good observation on bigotry that I got from the book World War Z of all places is that to hate one group, you must first love another. no hate group in existence defines themselves by hating a group- no, not even that one- they define themselves as uplifting their own group, and any perceived hostility is just them “protecting” themselves.
for example, consider “The Fourteen Words”, that thing that neonazis and other conservatives are referencing every time they put 1488 on something and call themselves clever: the actual text has no hate in it. I’m lifting this next part off of Wikipedia:
The primary slogan in the Fourteen Words is, “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children,” Followed by the secondary slogan, “because the beauty of the White Aryan woman must not perish from the Earth.”
you’ll notice at no point is there any mention of hating anyone else, not even in the full quote. now contrast that with how the terf regards trans folk; the terf thinks she’s “protecting women” against “perverted infiltrators” and “brainwashed traitors”, so how could any of the vile things she says against these “obvious threats” be anything but morally justified? by that same token, ask her what women she’s actually protecting by telling a teenaged trans girl to kill herself over wearing a dress, and odds are you’ll get an answer that strongly resembles the terf.
now the fact that I’m a Straight White Male™ is enough for lotsa folks on here to dismiss anything I say on the subject outta hat, like “how dare I lecture anyone else on bigotry, knowin’ what I am and what my kind has done”. but see, to truly discard bigotry, a big part is admitting that we’re all the same, and nobody’s special, one way or the other. and this is how hatred starts, by loving something else so much that nothing else could compare, and how dare they try to take what you love away from you
“He has to fund the Justice League. They often have a space program.”
“But couldn’t he do more good if he just invested-”
“The Earth is routinely invaded by aliens, gods, and the forces of an extraterrestrial god of tyranny.”
He has, like, three charitable organizations he funds, named after his father, his mother, and Alfred.
Between both Bruce and Batman’s contributions, Gotham should be a better city than it is, and the only reason it isn’t is DC Editorial Mandate that basically says Gotham has to get worse and worse and worse or there’s no Batman stories they can tell (and, obviously, they have no other characters besides Batman).
There’s a reason Batman thinks the city is literally cursed.
I want to see Bruce Wayne go off
“Oh, oh, just charity my way out of dealing with the Penguin, a living, breathing 19th century Marxist’s cartoon of the bourgeoisie? Just fund anti-Clayface measures? Crack down on corporations who put out shapeshifting cosmetics? What socio-economic pressures turn botonists into actual fucking dryads?! What inspires anti-animal terrorism? THAT’S NOT EVEN A REAL KIND OF ECO-FASCISM!”
For the record, Gotham is canonically curse, because it sits on some sort of evil swamp. I think.
There are like, half a dozen curses. The Lazarus Pits are leaching into the water, Slaughter Swamp is an unconnected body of water a few miles outside of the city that also ressurects people (see Solomon Grundy), the Bat-demon Barbatos and his followers (the Court of Owls) have been fucking up the city psychically and financially, the malevolent influence of the warlock Doctor Gotham’s tomb in the center of the city, the madness hypersigil of Amadeus Arkham (in Arkham Asylum: A Serious House on Serious Earth), there were several outposts of subterraneans and aliens beneath the city during the Silver Age, constant chemical warfare that makes it the equivalent of a WWI trench managed by MK-ULTRA, it’s in New Jersey, and I think God just hates it
tired: Batman could do more good by running charities than by fighting criminals
wired: Batman could save literally every other city on the planet simultaneously with the amount of effort and resources he’s pumped into Gotham, which is a lost cause, but this is his city damnit.
Inspired: Batman’s diligence is containing the menace that is Gotham’s madness from escaping too far from city limits.
For all his billions, for all his activity, for all his efforts, Gotham is a bonfire fed by the madness of mortal people, cultivated by dark powers and just existing there makes living souls like kindling for it. And left to its own devices,it’d become a breeding ground for supernatural unrest that no mere social service system or social awareness of activist campaign, no government program, no actions of a singular vigilante, could ever hope to undo.
Batman is single handedly if need be but fortunately not alone so often, holding back the noxious psychic influences of warp and wyrd entities and what they do to the very environment and landscape through the power of sheer, unbridled humanity.
Ascended: Gotham is containing Batman, because the forces of evil, consciously or not, have figured out that if let loose, this motherfucker and his sprawling adoptive family would’ve solved every crime in the world ever, so they throw literally everything they have at his home town in hopes that he stays there.
Because they were foolish and let Alan Scott escape. They aren’t making that mistake again.
What if Gotham is the pump?
Like. What if, because Gotham is such a shitshow, anyone looking to improve their lives has their eye on being able to move out of Gotham, so whenever Bruce Wayne’s charitable endeavors come somebody’s way, they take it, pack their bags, and move the fuck away, and take that money with them.
Meanwhile there’s an ongoing influx of people to Gotham primarily because they’re flat broke and real estate in Gotham is dirt fucking cheap because it’s a shitshow, and there’s always places hiring because 1) they’ve got Bruce Wayne money to try to make a difference, 2) there’s no shortage of places that need to be fixed up a little, and 3) villains are always in the market for new henchpeople.
So you’re a broke millennial from any other town in the country, and you have student loans, a job that hasn’t kept up with inflation, and your landlord has raised the rent three times this year so far and it’s eating up two-thirds of your paycheck. You look for housing on the internet and discover that one-third of your paycheck will get you the mortgage for an actual house in Gotham, a house you own and will never have to deal with your scummy rentjacking landlord again. And Wayne Industries is hiring, and so are sixteen different disaster remediation places, and six staffing services with a sort of weird vibe to them but they offer benefits, since when do temp agencies do benefits, and sure the crime rate is high but the rest of the world’s heading in that direction anyway, especially if you’re homeless, which you’re gonna be in like four months if that jackass your landlord raises the rent one more time, so get in losers, we’re going to Gotham!
And you settle into your bigger-than-expected apartment and get a job that brings you a comfortable paycheck and you learn to live with the terrorist attacks and the explosions and the gunfire and the neighbors and the drunken billionaire swimming in the restaurant fountain, and you pay off your student loans, buy a car, suffer a few months’ unemployment when your boss goes to jail for trying to assassinate the mayor and then your partner loses their job for a few months when the office gets smothered in a jungle’s worth of climbing plants and you develop hospital bills when you both get caught in a hallucinogenic terror gas eruption at the mall, but hey, you’d be homeless by now in any other city, so you live with it.
And then it’s a few years later and you’re wanting to start a family, but the neighbor three doors down owns pet hyenas and the park was firebombed last week and someone froze all the water pipes and you crashed your car into one of the impromptu ice sculptures and you’d really like your kids to grow up in a normal city where they don’t have to receive advice like “don’t talk to strange plants.”
So you visit one of the social work offices and get yourself a bit of assistance, save up your money, sell your house for the price of a down payment to the sort of incoming fool you were six years ago, and use your polished resume to get yourself a job someplace that doesn’t have What To Do If Clown Attack on their safety training syllabus.
You came, you left, and Gotham remains. A shithole.
This is a really well thought out way in what keeps Gotham moving. Sure there’s the people that have been there they’re whole lives, families that go back generations, but these are reasons people move in. The kind of people that want out. And maybe are desperate enough to take that Job hunching.
It’s also weird to see my pithy response circle around over 20 times and end up back on my dash…
When the glimmering hope continues against the tide of the hopeless.
I love all of this, but the addition of “and it’s in New Jersey” to why Gotham is like that made me laugh out loud.
And then the “they let Alan Scott escape” made me smile.
Enough Goncharov. I want to see more discussion of revolutionary 1928 film The Dancing Cavalier starring Don Lockwood and Lina Lamont (and the uncredited voice of Katherine Selden)
I want more discussion of S. Morgenstern’s original unabridged version of The Princess Bride. It’s so irritating that it’s now literally impossible to find anything other than Goldman’s abridgement. And this is presented as a good thing! Some of us like complicated social satire, William! Yet all that brilliance has been thrown out so we’re left with only the parts that are comprehensible to a ten-year-old boy! Absolutely maddening!
Wait wait wait Katherine Selden was in that movie?! How did I not recognize her voice, I tracked down so much grainy footage of her role as Wilma in A Night of Music when I was a kid just to hear her high notes in the bridge of Winter Song! *sigh* I guess I need to go watch The Dancing Cavalier again, it’s been ages since I’ve seen it. I just remember that green dress Lina Lamont wears in the second half, I want it so bad.
No yeah the crediting situation around The Dancing Cavalier is SO weird.
Apparently at the time it came out you could barely AVOID knowing she was in it? It was a massive scandal on opening night because apparently everyone was REALLY invested in Lina Lamont (who I’ll admit I’m not really a fan of in other things, but then I don’t watch a lot of silent film and that was her niche), and the revelation that she wasn’t the one talking OR singing absolutely torpedoed her career. Wild that lipsync controversies are as old as film with sound.
BUT, on the other hand, Katherine Selden wasn’t formally credited anywhere in the film itself. I have a vague impression there were contract complications with her or Lina Lamont or both? But the upshot was, even though it literally launched her career, she’s not “officially” in it. And so, nowadays, it’s really easy even for people who love Katherine’s voice and old films to assume it’s actually Lina Lamont singing!
Look, I’m not going to defend Lina Lamont’s actions, because she really did try to screw Selden out of getting any recognition for her work. However, she was trying to survive in a rapidly changing film landscape that seemingly had no use for actresses with unconventional voices. If you’re only familiar with her from The Dancing Cavalier and the few comedies she did in the 30s, it’s worth going back and watching a few of her silent movies to see what she was like as a leading lady. Most of them are lost media now but The Royal Rascal is really good and actually has a very sweet love story. Plus Don Lockwood got to swordfight and we all like that lol
Okay but who would win in a swordfight? Don Lockwood or Manny Patinkin?
I don’t know how much of a swordfight that would be seeing as Don Lockwood would LITERALLY dance around Mr. Patinkin. Mandy definitely knows his footwork and timing though, I’d love to see him in a musical- Hell, why not adapt all the nonsense behind The Dancing Cavalier as a sort of Musical Mockumentary?
Hi! Just saw the vivaldi fiddle video you reblogged, and I can I recommend you the album O'stravaganza? It's vivaldi meets celtic music, and I grew up on it and it's now my entire personality!
the fundamental problem on this website is that if a homeless person tried to talk to most of y’all you’d be scared out of your minds
see because people are actually seeing this i feel like i need to make it abundantly clear what i mean by this: in the united states context, the majority of social problems are just disappeared. the mentally ill are often relegated to their homes, to asylums (these still exist), to hospitals. the disabled, fat, and disfigured likewise. people called “criminal” disappear into the criminal punishment system and often never emerge.
if you live in any city in america, however, there are homeless people. they are the social problem that cannot be disappeared so easily. drive along a freeway outbound from the urban center to the suburbs and look into the trees. you’ll see tents, tarps, evidence of human habitation. walk through a downtown, even in coldest winter, and you’ll see bottles that weren’t there yesterday and clothes inexplicably abandoned. people tend to either not look at these things or to look at them and name them garbage. eyesore. they don’t consider what it would be like to carry everything you own on your back. how little energy you would have for recycling or cleaning up after yourself if you had been kicked out of your shelter at 7am that morning and now had to find a nook to hide out in to escape a -5F windchill. maybe you can go to a local public library, but maybe you can’t because you twitch or smell bad or talk to yourself and people only look at you out of the corner of their eye so they know what description to give the armed security guard at the front desk.
when i’m talking about looking at your unhoused neighbor, i’m talking about looking at them first. i’m talking about smiling and waving and maybe striking up a conversation. i’m talking about offering to grab lunch. i’m talking about indulging them even when they make you uncomfortable.
on memory care floors in hospitals you often encounter the problem of nurses who have been taught how to engage patients with memory issues but who do not give proper patient care because it makes them uncomfortable. they don’t want to lie or play pretend or do anything that takes them out of their very rigidly defined reality. an old man wakes up and tries to get out of bed because it’s time to feed the cows. he wonders where his wife is. it would make his nurse uncomfortable to tell him that his wife knew he needed some rest so she went out to feed the cows, so they tell him that his wife died five years ago and he doesn’t have his farm anymore. they break his heart rather than allow him to live in a better time for a little while longer.
back in december a man sat across from me on the train who was clearly struggling. i started a conversation with him about his art he was holding, which he told me were illustrated children’s books in a language he had always known. it was a syllabary i certainly didn’t recognize, and the illustrations weren’t anything i’ve seen in children’s literature, but we were suddenly both artists on the train. i showed him my journal and he complimented the pasting job on some of my collages. then he started to talk about angels. about his angel specifically, who had died and left him behind on earth. he missed his angel so much that he planned to commit suicide before christmas. i talked to him about his angel, and about love and grief and pain, all of which we could share. he began to call me jesus. i could have told him he was wrong, that i wasn’t even into the abrahamic religions, etc., and it would have broken his heart. instead i walked with him up from the train station—and got him through the armed transit cops who tried to stop him because he didn’t have a ticket—and gave him a picture of a loving savior, and a world that would be better for having him in it. instead of hugging some faggot, he ended up hugging a jesus that loved him. it was an odd situation. it made me a little uncomfortable. it may have been one of the few instances of kindness that he got that day. it may have been the first time in a while that someone who wasn’t unhoused or working the bread line actually started a conversation with him.
imagine if no one ever looked at you. don’t say some cute shit about “oh, i wish no one ever perceived me.” no you don’t. you wish you could control people’s perception of you. but what if people weren’t only not looking at you, but they already thought they knew you. you’re twitching so you’re on something. you’re staring at nothing so you’re dumb. you’re asking for money or food so you’re a leech on society. you’re talking to yourself so you’re dangerous. they don’t look at you but they know you. so they don’t speak to you bc they already know what they’re gonna find.
two and a half weeks ago my mom was found dead on the streets of san antonio. she’d been homeless there for about 12 years. i’d only just gotten stable enough to reach out to her. the woman i contacted at the day home she went to every month to get a haircut, her nails done, and to wash her clothes said she was doing well, that she was clean, that she was very polite, that she was smart. she had two dogs that she’d cared enough about to have microchipped. their names are fin and sophia. having those dogs probably made it so she couldn’t get permanent housing, because most housing programs for the homeless don’t allow them to bring pets. a lot of people choose to keep their pets rather than give them up as a condition of securing housing.
in denver, colorado i once met an unhoused man who had a master’s degree in geophysics. his thesis was on magnetic wells and their affects of satellite orbits. he was a birdwatcher.
when you refuse to look at homeless people, or the things they leave behind (often are forced to leave behind by cops), you are actively participating in the disappearance of a population. do you think you wouldn’t lose part of yourself if safety concerns made you nocturnal? if every time you got enough stuff to set up a good camp some suburbanite called the cops on your tent? would you not talk to yourself if no one else was speaking to you?
a lot of talk goes into the problem how easy it is to become homeless. one medical bill, one missed paycheck and your life is imperiled. well, there are a lot of people who are stepped over every day who already live your worst case scenario, and the simple fact is that the majority of people in the u.s. are too scared of having an uncomfortable or even perhaps scary interaction with an unhoused person to look at them. but i need y’all to know that you are not special. it isn’t just the dirtiest, most addicted, most mentally ill homeless people who are left to die on the streets alone. it is all homeless people. people who won’t leave behind beloved pets, people who couldn’t survive in academia, people who think they’re being gangstalked, people who have jobs, people who have families. if you are one missed paycheck from homelessness, you’re also one catastrophic tragedy, one spark that catches in the apartment on the other side of your building, one chance encounter with the drug that just won’t let you go. not one goddamn person on this earth is better than the unhoused person they step over on the way to get their morning coffee, and i hope to fuck y’all figure that out before you find yourselves disappeared too.
if you actually want to change the fucking world, maybe start with looking your neighbors in the eye.
fully to be a hater: do not reblog this post and focus in on the animals in the tags.
this post is about human beings who are suffering and dying. people with necrotized feet. people with cancer who are turned away from emergency rooms. people who need to eat and drink and go to the bathroom and bathe in safety and comfort.
the issue of unhoused people with pets is complex. for some people, their animals are all they have. many people end up taking better care of their animals than they do of themselves. many people receive help FOR THEIR ANIMALS more often than they receive help for themselves. many people end up giving up permanent housing to remain with their pets. the fact that housing becomes contingent on abandoning perhaps the only companion you have is fucked beyond all humanity.
however, i’m not going to have people coming into my goddamn tags and latching onto hypothetical animals. is it because i gave them names? is it because you can picture a sweet kicked puppy on the side of the road and that’s easier than the human subject of that paragraph, who was my dead mother? you people are insane. what do you mean you look at the animal to see if the person needs help? did you read the post? LOOK AT THE GODDAMN HUMAN BEING DYING IN FRONT OF YOU.
yknow overall i’m actually pretty happy with the tags ive been getting on this post. lots of good stories. even better that there’s so many people involved in direct action with their unhoused neighbors, through food banks and harm reduction.
however, if i could grab each and every person who’s like “oh it makes me so depressed when a homeless person says im the first person to help them today” and shake the shit out of them i would. not because i hate them or anything so strong. more just because it feels like it’s always gotta be about you. people telling me why they struggle to talk to homeless people as if i didn’t already say i don’t give a shit are especially egregious. oh, ur autistic? damn, imagine being homeless and autistic and completely unable to avoid discomfort and still being accepted to perform at a “normal” level or else you’ll get fucking abducted by cops. even after being as explicit as i fucking could, yall still just fundamentally can’t get it. (not everyone but most of) you think there’s some kind of magic story or symptom that will indemnify you of the crime of letting ur fellow man die on the street, but it won’t.
when i interact with homeless people, im not picking and choosing the most comfortable. when i moved into my new apartment with my husband, literally fresh off a 1000 mile drive across the country, a homeless dude in a wheelchair was outside screaming his head off. it would have been easy as pie to ignore him and get on with the business of unpacking our moving truck, but the thing about me is that i figured whatever discomfort i would experience through my interaction with him was a negligible fucking fraction of the discomfort he experienced daily and the distress he was feeling in that moment. he told me that people like me spit on him. throw shit (literal, human shit) on him from hotel balconies. call him n*gger. follow him for blocks in cars at night. threaten him. and yet, he still gave me the chance to talk to him despite everything about me SCREAMING danger. i was the danger. he was the brave one, not fucking me, because you know what, i’ve been unhoused (as a baby) and precariously housed (as a child and an adult), and have ALWAYS been around homeless people and not once have i been abused the way he had been abused by housed people. people in town for a sports game or a show at the theater or whatever bullshit makes someone stay at a fancy hotel, people most of yall would be much more comfortable talking with because they’re clean and friendly (to you) and safe (for you) were throwing their shit on this man. so no, i’m gonna be honest, i don’t much care for the excuses as to why the above is a hard ask, because im asking you for jack shit compared to what the unhoused are asked to do every day.
and to further credential myself, i’m an autistic, bipolar, transgender faggot who, through a combination of disabilities and grief, feels like a shambling corpse these days. and i’m still looking at people. still talking to them. so generally im very happy with where this post has gone, but there’s still a fundamental problem with how a lot of yall are(n’t) engaging with it. it ain’t about you. it stopped being about tumblr users inability to get outside themselves the second it started being about unhouse people’s inability to live, but all (some of) yall gotta say is “great post op! sure is hard to get outside of myself though”—
One thing I never really understood was Sleipnir (meaning “slippery one” fyi) in depictions of Norse mythology. Sleipnir is an eight-legged horse, the steed of Odin and the son of Loki, and he is commonly depicted like this:
(image not mine)
But why would you depict an eight-legged horse like this? Horses gallop the same way most other mammals run, with all feet leaving the ground at one point, so having extra feet here doesn’t seem like it could make the horse any faster. I’m also not sure it would give it any more stable footing, since it doesn’t have a wider base.
If you want a stable eight-legged form that can reach great speeds for its size, wouldn’t you want to start with what nature has already provided? Wouldn’t you want something more like… this?
(my drawing)
“But wait!” you might say, “Sleipnir was conceived when Loki, in horse-form, seduced another horse! That’s why it looks all horsey, just with extra bits!”
Well, that’s a good point, but consider that Loki as a deity was originally based off the spider, and his name even derives from the old Swedish word for spider (source). Therefore, it’s not too hard to believe Sleipnir inherited his horse half from his mother and the more spidery half from his father. In conclusion:
Spider-Horse, Spider-Horse, He does spider-things of course! Weaves a web, Makes you gawk, Riding round ‘til Ragnarok! Look out! Here comes the Spider-Horse.
I am all for creative interpretations of Sleipnir. And spiders, obviously. This is epic.
But just so you know, that journal is from the 60′s, and the current scholarly consensus no longer considers the spider etymology to be likely. We still aren’t sure where the name comes from, and probably won’t ever be, but I’ve seen quite a few more recent academics lean toward Old Norse luka, meaning “close”, “shut”, or “end.” (See Simek’s Dictionary of Northern Mythology.)
^^^^ my research found much the same. (which is sad, i like spiders)
As far as Sleipnir having eight legs, it’s probably a reference to Icelandic horses. Icelandic horses are one of the few horse breeds with five gaits. They can do a walk, trot and canter/gallop, like most horses. But they have also evolved to have a tolt,
[ gif of a man riding a brown Icelandic horse doing a tolt. The back legs of the horse move rather stiffly back and forth, while the front legs are lifted up almost to the horse’s chest. While the horse bounces slightly, the man riding the horse could probably hold a glass of water without spilling. ]
which is fast, smooth and noted for its explosive speed and ability to cover long distances.
The second unique gait is called flugskeið, or flying pace.
[ a light brown Icelandic horse demonstrating the flugskeið. With the exception of the wind in the horses’ mane, the upper part of the horse and the rider seem to almost be still, with the background simply zipping by them. The horse’s legs, however, move fast enough to blur. Unlike with a full gallop, the horse does not fully extend its legs away from its body. This is particularly obvious in the front legs of the horse, which lift up to the chest of the horse and land under its chin the same way as in the tolt]
It is both smooth and fast, some horses being able to reach speeds of 30 mph. Not all Icelandic horses can do a flugskeið, but you’ll notice that when done properly the legs move in unison and so fast they can blur, giving the illusion of the horse having eight legs.
Anyways, here is a video to further emphasize how cool the flugskeið is;
I’d never heard this theory! That’s so neat.
The one I’ve read attributed the eight legs thing to a metaphor of a coffin + 4 pallbearers.
You’ve brought my horse geek out now. You have been warned!
The thing is, until the late 1800s we didn’t know how horses moved.
In old paintings you typically see horses with their legs stretched wide as they thought that gave the appearance of great speed.
But it really just looks like Timmy’s big brother was being an evil bastard and bent the legs of his tin horses out .
It’s completely unnatural looking, but horses moved too fast for us to be able to see how they moved, until Edward MAuybridge captured their motion in a series of consecutive photographs in 1878.
And for the first time we could see that all four legs did leave the ground. (and are never stretched uncomfortably wide!).
He also created the first motion picture as the individual photographs could be put together as a series of film frames (below).
So, all this is to say that back when Sleipnir was being dreamed up, they didn’t understand how animals moved and probably thought more legs = faster, and to a degree they were right, things on four legs run faster than bipeds so they continued that principle to its logical, if incorrect, conclusion.
