Smoke 'em if you got 'em.

"Arts 'N Crass" [S2 Ep01]

i hit rock bottom like every 5 hours

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.

just give me 20 to 40 minutes to think on it and i can come up with the most passably human sentences you've ever heard so help me god

king

King

“Pack it up boys we’ve made a social blunder” is the funniest sentence I’ve ever read 😭😭😭😭😭

was anyone going to tell me that the pope's dressmaker posts dick and cock on instagram or was i supposed to find out for myself

waittttt there's more. apparently he was outed as a homosexual by a competitor but the pope was like well the gowns are sickening so what am i gonna do about it? and so he's still the pope's dressmaker even though he said vatican priests tried to fuck him all the time when he was closeted. work

He also makes SEX perfume

Bette Davis & Maggie Smith DEATH ON THE NILE (1978) dir. John Guillermin 

@matzahball

For a second I didn’t realize it meant “high” as in a stoner–I thought “High Geologist” was like a rank of geologist or something and he was insulted you would challenge him to naming stones

great poast every one👍

I have drawn him…. The High Geologist

Can’t believe he’s ace

He is now And here’s the photo evidence:

hey guys…https://twitter.com/MatthewLillard/status/1322648148364324864 so does this make it canon?

the high geologist has ascended

every time i see this post it gets…. better? but also weirder.

I always gotta reblog the High Geologist once in a while.

I love this too much.

Reblog to get to look at a cool rock from the High Geologist

You know what animal should be on those "these animals are not the size you think they are" posts? Platypuses. You don't know what size a platypus is. Phineas and Ferb is lying to you.

LITTLE

I always thought they were beaver sized!

This is my cat, Pigeon...

this is my cat, Pigeon :)

This is my cat, Pigeon 🤷‍♀️

Beautiful pigeons, everybody. Particularly enchanted by the last one, who appears to be some sort of nun.

Leverage had a lot of well-researched things to say about the real world, but the one I always come back to, from The Double Blind Job:

Sophie: These are not small fines. Last year, my department handled a case where the company had to pay out $2.5 billion.

Hoffman: Oh, yeah. Everybody heard about that. But what the news didn’t tell you is that that company made $16 billion on the same drug. That fine was 14% of the profit. 14%. That’s like tipping your waiter.

MIKE MILLER IN EVERY EPISODE ↳ Season 02, episode 01 – “Is There Anybody Out There?”.

Janusz Stanny