courtesy of @lunaactias i have now watched the terror. i must concede it was actually pretty good, but there's one thing it's clearly missing

explanation of the deep significance of this scrungy puppet in british culture below

1906

okay what did i miss

(yes some of these overlap and some are suppositions. for example if parchment is always used for ephemera, rough drafts, notes, and never re-used or re-purposed, we can also assume that the author is unaware of wax tablets as a concept)

realised I did at least two of these in my little medieval novella 😭

as penance you have to write us a novella with a sexy professional scribe who spends about 80% of the book lovingly preparing a piece of parchment for writing

drypoint ruling as foreplay. it's the next big thing

@huntingthehaggis, are you also suffering? ;0;

You guys rlly don't realise how much knowledge is still not committed to the internet. I find books all the time with stuff that is impossible to find through a search engine- most people do not put their magnum opus research online for free and the more niche a skill is the less likely you are to have people who will leak those books online. (Nevermind all the books written prior to the internet that have knowledge that is not considered "relevant" enough to digitise).

Whenever people say that we r growing up with all the world's knowledge at our fingertips...it's not necessarily true. Is the amount of knowledge online potentially infinite? Yes. Is it all knowledge? No. You will be surprised at the niche things you can discover at a local archive or library.

frodo baggins the iconic reluctant hero who saved the entirety of arda deserves so much better than “sam gamgee is the real hero” i said what i said

#yes!!!!!! its not that sam’s contributions shouldn’t be appreciated #but frodo bore like impossible psychological torment and despair #and yet clowns still act like this because #he does actually crack and struggle under the stress #and he doesn’t have some aragorn style battle scene #but GO OFF i guess

“Frodo deserved all honour because he spent every drop of his power of will and body, and that was just sufficient to bring him to the destined point, and no further. Few others, possibly no others of his time, would have got so far.” –J. R. R. Tolkien, Letter 192

Let’s be real, at least half the reason people refuse to see Frodo as the “real hero” of the story is because he actively chooses non-violence and mercy. 

I remember some YouTube commenter writing “Frodo is so overrated, he never even kills anyone” and if that doesn’t win the award for Most Impressive Failure to Get the Point, I’m not sure what does. 

#tbh I adore sam gamgee#but he would throw hands if he knew people were praising him by putting frodo down via @the-artifice-of-eternity

some little hobbit child listening to a story: geez did Frodo even do anything

all the adults in the room: no doN’T

samwise gamgee vaulting in through the window: FIRST OF ALL

Hot Take time:

Neither of them is a hero.

They are two halves of a single hero. (No, this is not a joke about being hobbit-sized.)

Frodo is the one who has to bear the mental torture and hardship of the Ring–but without Sam, he couldn’t have. Who is there to offer a joke, a smile, a hug, an unjudging ear, an extra bite of bread when Frodo looks peaky and ill, a doubled-up bedroll when it’s too cold for a small hobbit used to a good hole with a warm fire? Frodo would have failed long before he reached Mount Doom without Sam to cheer him on.

Likewise: Sam could never have made the journey alone. He doesn’t have Frodo’s mental strength. But he’s a gardener: his job is to make things grow, to nurture them and make them flourish. Who is there to give him a purpose as he travels across a land so big, so far, hoping to save his home?

Separate the pair of them, and neither would have made it. Frodo needed the shelter of Sam’s heart in order to find his way–and Sam needed a leader.

It’s literally love and friendship and camaraderie that save Middle Earth. Neither could be the chosen one alone.

And that was, in fact, Tolkien’s entire point.

As a former humanities student, I feel it is my duty to reblog this one.

A tech bro tried to convince me AI was amazing cause "you could make 30,000 screenplays in minutes" not realising that every single one would be shit, you'd have to sift through everything just to find some good bits, time wasted that could've been spent just writing a screenplay.

Technology Brothers know nothing about what goes into creating a work, other than the fact a work has been created to be exploited for cash. They see creativity as an investment opportunity, not a love for humanity.

Matthew Dow Smith: "Just remember: Arts & Humanities are so useless and pointless that Tech Bros were driven to spend billions of dollars to try and get a computer to do something that badly approximates something Arts & Humanities students could do half asleep and wired on coffee the night before the due date."

Thinking of the larger context of LOTR and like, the fellowship swapping old war stories and shit and Sam just says “Yeah I killed a huge spider…Shelob, I think?”

And Gandalf just blinks and is like, “You what now?”

“Yeah, killed it. Had to save Frodo”

Gandalf elects not to tell Sam that he killed the spawn of a primordial demon.

the daughter of the embodiment of darkness which ate the original sun and moon and almost ate the devil.

That's not important. What is important is that it was a danger to Mister Frodo.

It puzzles me when people cite LOTR as the standard of “simple” or “predictable” or “black and white” fantasy. Because in my copy, the hero fails. Frodo chooses the Ring, and it’s only Gollum’s own desperation for it that inadvertently saves the day. The fate of the world, this whole blood-soaked war, all the millennia-old machinations of elves and gods, comes down to two addicts squabbling over their Precious, and that is precisely and powerfully Tolkien’s point. 

And then the hero goes home, and finds home a smoking desolation, his neighbors turned on one another, that secondary villain no one finished off having destroyed Frodo’s last oasis not even out of evil so much as spite, and then that villain dies pointlessly, and then his killer dies pointlessly. The hero is left not with a cathartic homecoming, the story come full circle in another party; he is left to pick up the pieces of what was and what shall never be again. 

And it’s not enough. The hero cannot heal, and so departs for the fabled western shores in what remains a blunt and bracing metaphor for death (especially given his aged companions). When Sam tells his family, “Well, I’m back” at the very end, it is an earned triumph, but the very fact that someone making it back qualifies as a triumph tells you what kind of story this is: one that is too honest to allow its characters to claim a clean victory over entropy, let alone evil. 

So where’s this silly shallow hippie fever-dream I’ve heard so much about? It sounds like a much lesser story than the one that actually exists.

+1 You know how Frodo leaves Sam with the legacy of the quest - the job of bearing witness to what happened - and the duty to finish and protect his writings? Tolkien lost all but one of his friends in WW1. He was founder member of a literary club at school - the TCBS. There was a larger group and a core of four. They all stayed friends, they kept writing and sharing their work with each other. And they were almost all killed. One of them, Geoffrey Smith, wrote this to Tolkien in 1916. My chief consolation is that if I am scuppered tonight – I am off on duty in a few minutes – there will still be left a member of the great T.C.B.S. to voice what I dreamed and what we all agreed upon.  […] May God bless you my dear John Ronald and may you say things I have tried to say long after I am not there to say them if such be my lot. And that was his last letter. There’s something eerie about the way he seems to have pegged Tolkien as an eventual survivor.  Sam’s survival (and his emergence as the true hero of the book) are beautiful because they’re suffused with loss, because they’re not the grand conquering heroic narrative that on some level was “supposed” to happen.

Tolkien possibly only survived because he got trench fever - a particularly nasty disease carried by lice - and got sent home because he was desperately ill. Considering how the rest of his unit fared, it probably saved his life. Unpleasant and unglamorous, but if not for that, we wouldn’t have LOTR. I’m sure survivor’s guilt was a factor - as was a sickening sense of dread when “The War to End All Wars” didn’t, and his son went off to WWII.

TLOTR has some of the type of valorization of war that you find in the Old Norse and Anglo-Saxon literature that JRRT loved and studied and taught because he loved that style and it’s deeply fitting for cultures like the Rohirrim, but it’s also full of the slog of war, the waste and tragedy, and the irrevocable damage that even victorious survivors carry for the rest of their lives. Frodo’s symbolic “death” is also resonant for survivors of what was called “shell-shock” then and PTSD now.

I mean, it’s not Game of Thrones. It’s not gritty in the same way. But the protagonist of LOTR was minor gentry from a backwater nobody’d heard of, and the REAL hero who saved the world by saving him was his gardener. All the great kings and queens and lords and ladies in the story are background characters compared to the story of the little people. Literally little people, but symbolically too.

Zoozve, my beloved

"...we don't live in a big clockwork, we live in a dance club..."

This is my favorite line.

I have learned so many things from this.

When your name literally means “Battle Survivor” but you’re starting to wonder if Tolkien meant that as some kind of joke:

Seriously, though, I am still DEEP into my feelings about Obscure Blorbo Guthláf, and I remain fascinated by Tolkien’s thought process on his name, which really does mean “Battle Survivor.” In the drafts, Guthláf the banner bearer’s name was Guthwin (“Battle Friend”). Tolkien changed it later and gave that name to Éomer’s sword (written instead as Gúthwinë), but at that point he had ALREADY written that the banner bearer died at the Pelennor Fields. So he made a conscious decision to bestow the name Battle Survivor on a character that he knew full well had died in battle. Why? Who knows! Maybe it was ironic commentary. Maybe he thought it was funny. To me, it is just one more tragic element in Guthláf’s story and one more thing to get all emotional about. But then again, I do so enjoy getting weepy about my favorite horse boys.

One thing that (equivalente inglés de "me rompe las pelotas" no tengo ganas de traducir) me about modern astrologers is that it doesn't involve actual astral bodies anymore. Oooh, you made me a natal chart by reading a book or some website and gave me a personality test, who cares. Now, if you actually came to me and told me "I was watching the sky all night and I noticed a meteor passed by your sign" I might pay more attention to you.

Or maybe incorporate some of the new constellations here in the Southern Hemisphere. Who cares about Taurus or Aquarius, always with the Northern hemisphere, I want to see what Microscopium or Horologium means for my future (real constellations BTW). I haven't seen any astrologers talk about any constellations or celestial bodies besides the Zodiac and the solar system. I'm not sure if some of them even KNOW the Zodiac are actual stars that you can go outside and look. Come on, tell me what the Messier Catalog means for my love life.

Did you notice that the Tres Marías (Orion Belt) was up in the sky when Argentina won its third world cup? That's REAL astrology for me.

One would think that with the improvements on astronomy, the discovery of two new planets (and lots of minor planets) in the Solar System and so many other cool stuff in astronomy, that actual astrologers would go nuts with it, they would try to fit Uranus and Neptune and the galaxies and the nebulae and all that cool stuff in their horoscopes, they would look at NASA's new announcements and tell me what they mean for my future and do predictions and shit

I'm sure some do, not to generalize. But all modern astrology seems to be to me is just "oh tell me your birthday and I'll assign some generic random personality to you". Boring.

At that point, just drop the "astro" thing and just tell me you're assigning personalities based on a calendar instead of the stars. Otherwise, put some work on it, pick up a telescope and go learn some real astronomy and make some mysticism out of that.

I also desperately want astrology to give me a heartily satisfying justification for why (apparent) retrograde matters. Rather famously, humanity eventually discovered that the Sun is the centre of the universe rather than the Earth, so we now know that planets like Mercury are not and never have been in actual retrograde: they are not moving backwards. Why would a planet appearing to move backwards—but not actually moving backwards—influence my life?

For that matter, what’s the significance of the stars only appearing in their constellations from the point of view of Earth? Are the shapes and histories of the vastly distant stars which we call “constellations” really just a coincidental manifestation of a truth which humans can only grasp using culturally inherited patterns and names? Do the patterns matter? Or does the truth use those patterns as shorthand for something more cosmically true?

I want to know what astrology means when you ask the obvious questions but still come out the other side with belief.

Transcript:

[on MSNBC, a headline at the bottom reads: Breaking News, Mideast Conflict Divides The World. Above the video of the news reporter, a TikTok user has captioned: "if ur still not sure where you stand on the ongoing ge.0c!de watch this"; all emphasis mine.]

"And given these bombings are being done using our tax dollars, perhaps we should ask some questions. For example, how does bombing a densely populated land strip filled 50% with children constitute self-defense?

How does bombing hospitals, churches, mosques, and U.N. schools constitute self-defense? 'Well,' you say, 'if Hamas fighters are hiding in the hospital, using civilians as human shields' — okay, let's say they are.

Are you arguing that flattening the hospital and killing newborns in their incubators and their moms in the NICU, cancer patients, someone with a broken leg, the doctors, nurses, and just the women and kids hiding in the hospital — that that's not a war crime?

Because you would be wrong, according to international law.

'But why don't the people in Gaza just turn over Hamas militants to the Israelis?' Okay, how do you propose they do that? Hamas is the defacto government in Gaza, as they're the ones with the guns. The leaders of Hamas aren't even in Gaza. And if they were...

If you were a teenager living in an open air prison getting bombed day and night by, let's say Mexico, and Mexican police kicked in the door and raided your house any time they wanted and turned off the water and cut off your food, what are you going to do? Side with them? Help them while you're dying?

That's like asking why Black folks don't help or trust the police.

'Okay, but after 9/11, we bombed Afghanistan in self-defense,' yeah... we did! And did that put an end to al Qaeda or get bin Laden? No! It did not. Because like Hamas, bin Laden wasn't in the country we were bombing. President Obama got him 10 years later in Pakistan using special forces and without bombing scores of kids to death.

Bombing Afghanistan did buy us a 20 year occupation that got us more enemies in the Muslim world, when we scooped people up on the battlefield and dragged them off to Gitmo, and when we threw in a gratuitous war against Iraq, based on lies by a Bush administration, that traded on our anger and our fear, the world rose up against us as we committed torture — and tossed former Iraqi police and soldiers into makeshift gulags and those prisoners later turned into ISIS.

Oh, and the Taliban are back in control of Afghanistan, so again, what is the goal? Of mass bombing Gaza? Is it to find the people Hamas militants abducted on October 7th? Okay, how? By flattening whatever shelter they're taking from the bombs? Don't you risk killing them all by bombing them with the Palestinians?

Just some relevant questions. And trust me: people do want answers. Over the weekend, protests erupted around the world with hundreds of thousands of demonstrators rallying in cities in Europe, the Middle East, Asia, Copenhagen, Rome, Stockholm, Kuala Lumpur. Scores took to the streets in the U.S., shutting down the Brooklyn Bridge in New York & a major highway in San Francisco.

The call in each of these protests was for a ceasefire. A word that for some, has somehow come to mean 'anti-semitism and a lack of care about those who were brutally killed on October 7th', or even support for Hamas.

So how, then, do you explain the family members of some of those being held by Hamas who are also calling for a ceasefire?

And what would a ceasefire even mean? Well, it would literally mean both sides stop shooting. No more rockets into Israel, no more Israeli jets strafing Gaza. It would mean a prisoner's swap negotiated by credible third parties which sadly, probably doesn't include us at this point.

It would mean getting food, water, and medicine into Gaza and not pushing for two million Palestinians to expel themselves to Egypt or Jordan, likely to never be allowed to return. Hopefully, it would mean tamping down the McCarthyism and the doxing and anti-semitism and islamophobia and anti-Palestinian racism in our own country and in Europe.

And then somebody, anybody, actually working to solve the real problem: which is a 56-year occupation of the West Bank and Gaza strip, that has sparked and will continue to spark vehement (and yes, even violent) resistance whether Hamas exists or not."

[a TikTok end screen pops up, showing that this video is from user @sainthoax]

it's kind of crazy climate change has occurred at such a remarkable pace that I and everyone else around my age can remember a completely different climate in our childhoods. I truly watched winter gradually disappear in my life.

"You're too young to remember this, but there used to be so many insects outside that you would have to clean them off the windshield after a long car ride" is the kind of sentence that would have been in a cheesy scifi short story earlier in my life, perhaps submitted to a literary magazine and accepted to show support for its environmentalist message - now it's something I've said in earnest.

Funny what a little bit of Holocaust denialism will get you trending with.

Also, worth noting that calling it "Holocaust denialism," as Aye and Alejandra Carabello (and myself) have, is not hyperbole.

JK Rowling is denying that trans people were targetted by the Nazis, and promoting the tweets of known anti-trans activists screeching that any insistence that we were is "the LGBTQ+ lobby" revising history. That is, by a 2022 ruling on a case regarding similar tweets by the Regional Court of Cologne, (translation) "a denial of Nazi crimes."

She is, by German court precedent, quite literally engaging in an element of Holocaust denial.

In case anyone is unfamiliar with the Nazis' destruction of both gay and trans culture in Germany, Germany had a sympathetic gay and trans health clinic in the early 1900s. The Nazis destroyed it and burned literature studying homosexuality, gender noncomformity, and what we now understand to be transgenderness or transexuality. This took place only 3 months after Hitler came into power.

In addition to homosexuality, crossdressing was illegal under the Hitler regime even though trans people had (albeit limited) rights prior to his rise to power. And before anyone says it, the trans holocaust victims we talk about weren't misidentified crossdressers, drag artists, or gender-nonconforming people. One trans woman, Liddy Barcroff, died in a concentration camp for her "crossdressing" after telling arresting police “my sense of my sex is fully and completely that of a woman.” The queer community, all of us, suffered huge losses both in individuals and in education and understanding during the Holocaust. Denying any part of that is offensive and dangerous.

It's also important to add that the founder of that institute was Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld, who was a gay Jew. This allowed Nazis to claim that Jews were promoting homosexuality to "destroy the family" and weaken the white race.

You know, pretty much exactly what Republicans are saying now, just in dogwhistles.

hey my history of drag post becomes incredibly relevant!

It legitimately amazes me how the “We can't allow the Holocaust to happen again” crowd can look at something like this and still claim that the Israeli government isn’t committing any war crimes.

Absolutely horrific stuff.