#european pony

[artthatgivesmefeelings]

William Adolphe Bouguereau (French, 1825-1905) La bourrique (The Pony-back ride), 1884

[galleryofart]

A Mother with Her Son and a Pony

Artist: Agostino Brunias (Italian, 1728-1796)

Date: circa 1775

Medium: Oil on Canvas

Collection: Yale Center for British Art, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut

[askmovieslate]

It’s not a very original, or obscure pick, I know. But when you like something, you just like it.

It’s as simple as that.

You don’t need to pick an obscure movie just to try and be better than anyone else.

[theruffiansretrorampage]

art by ANDREU-T

[ghoulgist]

absolutely not sunny john.

[ladywaterfall]

Checked my followers before and after my Eurovision spree, in true tradition I lost some this year too

[crowchemicals]

Since ComicCon has come to an end, i thought I'd show yall which cosplays i brought this year! + The debut of my harley cosplay

First day dabi, second day harley which was 100% made by me except for like the boots. and third day rarity

Also the obligatory picture with comiccon jesus.

Oh and the Ghost in my harley pic is my brother 💞

[thegreateyeofsauron]

i remember a bunch of people making ponysona's and wishing they were ponies irl and doing like revolver ocelot hypnotism to convince themselves they were ponies and then panicking because the ponification hex kicked in while they were driving to work, but then loudly insisting theyre nothing like furries because furries are *weird*. (they're all furries now.)

Does anyone remember the internet when MLP first got popular and people online were insisting They were swearing up and down that the show was for adults, and that it was marketed towards kids but was Definitely For adults, full of mature humor and dark concepts and deep complex characters. and then nowadays you go look up an episode of MLP: FiM and the episode synopsis is something like Pinkie Pie Lost Her Balloon 🎈💔

[rockieriel]

girl (gender neutral) why are people on pinterest calling kandi bracelets "so 2020/2021" what the fuck does that even mean

[homunculus-argument]

I may be swinging a fruit bat in a room full of hornet's nests here, but do americans know that most of the world doesn't look the way the US does? Like, specifically concerning ethnic diversity.

Coming from Europe, the fist time I went to the US, I was shocked by it, not in a negative way but in the same "wow, that's a real thing?" sort of way as western people finding out that there actually are that kind of pillar mountains in China, or americans who had never seen Fjord Horses in anything but the movie Frozen finding out that those fantastical yellow ponies are actually real.

And it wasn't some "backcountry rural hick sees Different Colour Person for the first time and dies of shock" sort of a thing. I had travelled before, and at 19 I considered myself quite worldly enough to go to a different continent I had never been on to go meet up a man from the internet, all by myself. I had been all over Europe from Iceland to St. Petersburg and from Norway to France, I have travelled. It was a slow realisation that it's turtles all the way down, that actually got me.

Being in an airport, going from one airport to another, I wasn't surprised by the sheer range of different kinds of people I saw. Airports just look like that, all over the world. Taking one flight after another, I didn't pay much attention to that, because airports just look like that. The "wait, holy shit" didn't hit me until I was already in rural Kentucky, in a fucking Wal-Mart. And if you're an american and the thought of a late teens nordic kid stepping foot into a Wal-Mart for the frist time and thinking "wow, this is actually what America looks like, all the time" makes you want to get defensive, it was by no means a negative feeling.

It was like looking into a bag of M&Ms. That's the only way I could describe it. Every single fucking person, group or family that I saw was apparently different colour and creed than the last ones who passed by. I had never seen black women with styled hair before because in Finland almost every single black woman you see is muslim and their hair is covered. I was used to the concept of large cities being more diverse, in FInland larger cities are the places where you're most likely to see people who aren't white. And I was stunned by just how colourful the population was in goddamn Beaver Dam, Kentucky.

I'm not trying to make any kind of a political point here. I'm just talking from my own experience as a Chronically Online European who has actually been abroad: City streets that look the way they do in the US are completely foreign to most people who are not american. And every time you people start complaining about why a game that's set in Poland, made by polish creators who have never been outside of Poland, only has polish people in it, they genuinely do not know what the hell you're talking about.

[laurasimonsdaughter]

“The first thing you need to know,” the stable master announced loudly to the gaggle of school children trailing behind her, “is that these are not unicorns.”

Eleven-year-olds tended to be loud. Their silent scepticism was deafening.

“You cannot keep unicorns in captivity,” she continued. “These are all crossbreeds, mostly with specific breeds of horses.”

There was a small murmur of curiosity and a gangly arm shot up into the air.

“Yes?”

“Only mostly horses?”

It was always fun when some of them paid close attention. “Only mostly horses. I only deal with European breeds, and they tend to cross well with horses. See this here is a cross between a grey Thoroughbred and an English Unicorn. They’re large, and reasonably docile.” They also had that champagne sheen most showy folk preferred. “For people who come here looking for a steed, this is their best bet. Although I've only ever seen it done by people who personally broke them as yearlings.”

By now she definitely had the whole class’s full attention.

“But this French Licorne cross is actually half fallow deer.” She gestured to the pasture beyond the fence. “Look at them. Slight build, slender legs, built for speed and agility. They need a lot of space but they are beautiful to look at, and they’re relatively easy to tame for the pure of heart.” There was still something distinctly deer-like about them and they were all so beautifully cream coloured that they almost took on a silver hue.

“What’s those hairy ones?” a voice piped up.

“That’s a Unicorno/Shetland mix, from central Italy. Traditionally they tend to be crossed with Monterufolino, but they are hard to come by and make their coats even darker.” Unicorni were naturally built more like ponies, some with considerably shorter horns, and their coats were often a much darker gold, or even brown. They were less flighty than the French breeds though, even if they showed blatant favouritism towards certain caretakers. They would even pull a carriage if properly motivated.

“Do you have any bigger ones?”

The stable master turned around. “What was that?”

One of the boys was standing behind her with a determined look on his face. “Do you have any like that but bigger. With the beards and the furry hooves.”

“Feathering,” she corrected automatically and the boy nodded eagerly. She frowned. “What exactly do you mean?”

“There’s really big unicorns,” he pressed. “With wild manes and tails and split hooves like the French ones but hair like those ones!”

“Buddy,” she laughed, “what you’re describing there is a Scottish unicorn and let me tell you, they cannot even be crossbred into domestication.”

The little face fell.

“Any offspring of an Aon-adharcach will be as wild as they are no one can capture them with their horn still intact, not on your life. You go near one of them with a halter and it will skewer you.”

She smiled at the boy, who still looked rather taken aback, despite this proof of his favourites superiority.

“Tell you what. If you want to see something unhinged and imposing, I’ll take you to see the Eenhoorn/Friesian cross we’ve just got in from the Netherlands.”

[astronicht]

I’m fine, I’m fine, it’s totally cool that the last galdor (spoken charm particularly used, under various names, in the Dark Ages in the European North Atlantic) Gandalf lays down is “You cannot pass.” And that the SECOND to last galdor Gandalf lays down is to protect the abandoned Bill the Pony.

[theruffiansretrorampage]

art by ANDREU-T

[hedgehog-moss]

I randomly found a 500 page French book on OpenLibrary about the etymology of animal names so here are 10 (ish) fun facts:

the French word for poodle, “caniche” looks like it definitely comes from Latin “canis��� (dog) but no! It comes from cane / canard (duck) because it was a waterfowl-hunting dog—and its name in English, Swedish, German, Dutch (poodle, pudel, puedel) also reflects this dog’s affinity with water (from pudeln = to splash about). It’s like otters, whose name come from the same root as water...

the canary on the other hand is named after canis / dog, since it comes from the Canary Islands which, according to Pliny the Elder, were named after the huge dogs that lived there at some point. Some historians think these mysterious big dogs were actually seals or big lizards. Then a bird ended up with the name ‘from the dog place’ though it’s unclear if dogs were ever truly involved. (Meanwhile Spain / Hispania comes from the Phoenician i-shepan-im, the place with rabbits.) I like the idea of ancient humans seeing seals or lizards and going “weird dogs”. Like how ancient Greeks saw hyenas and named them “pigs, I guess?”

the fox has a great diversity of names in Europe: fox / Fuchs, zorro, räv, volpe, raposa, lisu, róka, renard... In French it used to be called ‘goupil’, from the same Latin root as the Italian ‘volpe’, but then the mediaeval cycle of poems known as Le Roman de Renart, about an unprincipled fox named Renart, became so popular that renard became the word for fox and goupil disappeared. It’s like if 500 years from now bears in English were called baloos. (The English and German words for fox come from the indo-european root puk- which means tail, like Hungarian ‘farkas’ (wolf) which means tail-having, or squirrel, from the Greek words for shade + tail, there are actually lots of animals that are just “that one with a tail”...)

French has a word for baby rabbit (lapereau) derived from Latin leporellus (little hare) and we used to have a word for adult rabbit (conin) from Latin cuniculus (rabbit)—related to the German Kaninchen, Italian coniglio, Spanish conejo, etc. But ‘conin’ in Old French also meant pussy (there were mediaeval puns about this in the Roman de Renart) and at some point I guess people were like okay, it was funny at first but we’ve run this joke into the ground, and a new and politically correct word appeared for adult rabbit (lapin) based on the pre-existing word for baby rabbit (lapereau).

The english bear is thought to come from the proto-IE root bher-, for brown—I love how Finnish has so many nicknames and euphemisms for “bear” ranging from “honey palm” to “apple of the forest” and English is like... dude’s brown. Same amount of effort with the Swedish and Danish words for fox, räv / ræv, from a root that means reddish-brown. (And the Hungarian word for lion, oroszlán, along with the Turkish ‘aslan’, comes from proto-Turkic arislan / arsilan which comes from arsil which means brown...) And since brown was already taken, ‘beaver’ (+ German, Dutch, Swedish...: Biber, bever, bäver) has been speculated to come from bhe-bhrus-, a doubling of the original root so... brownbrown.

English foal / German Fohlen / French poulain / Italian puledro all come from the proto-IE root pu- which means small (e.g. Latin puer and Greek pais = child)—then the French ‘poulain’ became ‘poulenet’ with the diminutive -et (so, a smallsmall animal) and poulenet became powny in Scots then pony in English, which was then re-imported by French as ‘poney’. Also the Spanish word for donkey, burro, comes from Latin burricus = small horse, and in French Eeyore is named Bourriquet with the -et diminutive ending, so we just keep taking small horses and turning them into smallsmall horses...

The boa (bo(v)a) shares the same etymology as bovine / bœuf / beef, due to a widespread belief that some snakes suckled milk from cows. Pliny the Elder stated this as fact and (not to bully him but) modern research tells us “there is no empirical basis for saying snakes like mammal milk; experiments, indeed, have shown that captive snakes systematically refuse to drink milk”

I was disappointed to learn that antelope comes from Greek anthólops which referred to a mythical creature, because I grew up convinced the origin of the word (antilope in French) was anti-lupus, as in, the gazelle is the generic prey so as a concept it’s the opposite of the wolf, the generic predator. Wolf and anti-wolf. Though it raised the question of why we don’t have antilions (zebra), anticats (mice) and antibears (salmons)

Many European languages have named kites after some sort of flying animal: in English it comes from the word for owl, in Portuguese from the word for parrot, in Italian from eagle, and in French it’s cerf-volant aka flying-deer. There’s an interesting hypothesis for this! Kites came to Europe from China, where they were often shaped like dragons or snakes, and snake is serpent in French and serpe in Old French, so it’s possible that kites were serpe-volants aka flying-snakes. But the ‘p’ and ‘v’ next to one another were a hassle to pronounce so the p got dropped and it became ser-volant, then ‘ser’ which isn’t a word started being mistaken for ‘cerf’ which is pronounced ‘ser’ but means deer... (We did it again with chauve-souris (bald-mouse = bat), which comes from the Gaulish cawa-sorix aka owl-mouse—which makes more sense as a name for bats! similar to the German Fledermaus, flying-mouse, and Spanish murciélago, blind-mouse. But Gaulish ‘cawa’ was mixed up with Latin ‘calva’ = chauve = bald, so now a French bat is a bald-mouse)

I love etymology, it’s all flying deer and dogs named splash and snakes named cow and ponies named smallsmall and five animals named brown and three named tail—words acquire a veneer of linguistic respectability over the centuries and we forget that fundamentally everyone just says whatever

[doyoulikethissong-poll]

Ginuwine - Pony 1996

"Pony" is a song by American singer Ginuwine, released as the debut single from his first album, Ginuwine…The Bachelor (1996). Ginuwine co-wrote and produced the song with Swing Mob associates Static Major, Digital Black, Smoke E. Digglera, and Timbaland; the latter made his breakthrough as a producer with the song. It peaked at number one on the Billboard Hot R&B Singles chart for two weeks, and reached number six on Billboard's Hot 100. Internationally, the song reached number three in Australia, number five in New Zealand, and charted within the top 40 in several European countries. Timbaland revealed during a lecture recorded for online education platform MasterClass, that the beat for the song was created in 1989 which was seven years prior to its 1996 release and the song was written and recorded in 1994 which was two years prior to its release.

The song experienced a resurgence in popularity after being featured in the 2012 film Magic Mike and its sequels. British house music duo Tough Love collaborated with Ginuwine and revamped the song as "Pony (Jump on It)", which was released on August 7, 2015, as their second single. In 2021, the duo Altégo posted a snippet of a mashup of "Pony" and Britney Spears's "Toxic" (poll #4) on TikTok, that quickly went viral. In January 2022, the mashup was officially released through Sony Music Entertainment under the title "Toxic Pony", being credited to Altégo, Spears and Ginuwine. The mashup reached number 40 on the Billboard Pop Airplay chart.

"Pony" received a total of 61,7% yes votes!

[majachee]

THE CHANGELING BROTHERS 🗣🗣🗣

Some design notes under cut:

In mythology, changelings are humanoid creatures that have been placed by fae (broad generalized term) in place of a human child, though there are also some stories here and there of adults being taken and replaced by changelings.

Changelings, based on my limited research, only really refer to the creature left behind during some good ol cradle robbing. They are related to the fae, though. Fae, or faeries, cover a broad range of different creatures in all sorts of European mythos, however, from elves to trolls to imps. In more modern art and stories, fae are drawn as tiny little humans with bug-like wings and long, flowing hair. But there have been less flattering depictions throughout history.

Taking the origin of the mythos, and the obvious bug inspiration in the show, I've decided to redesign these two to look like impish little sprites! Changelings in my AU are smaller than the average pony, usually reaching their chin or shoulders. They have thin, flexible bodies that are protected by an exoskeleton! Their jaws are an odd mix of mammalian and insect, so they can expand and protrude their lower jaws while their upper jaw stays fixed to their skull. Their tongues are thin, based on nectar-drinking bugs and animals like butterflies and hummingbirds.

Most changelings have two wings, only Pharynx and Thorax have four wings (reformed form only.)

Pharynx is also a bit taller than the average changeling drone... Have fun imagining how tall Thorax is. Height chart coming eventually.

Their tails are loosely based on a scorpion's stinger, but I took more inspiration from cartoony imp/devil tails in art and cartoons! 😇