Coolest thing about lord of the rings? The king of horses shows up. It appears he is no different from all other horses

King of the eagles shows up later. He can talk. Horse king couldn't talk.

He didn't want to talk to you.

Dune: Part One (2021) dir. Denis Villeneuve

Hey all, you know how internet searches suck now? When the results are awful, full-of-AI, death-of-the-internet levels of bad?

Start appending date constraints to your searches - "before:2023".

My results have gone from 90% AI bullshit to ~60% usable - which frankly at this point is a huge improvement.

people who don't wear glasses don't get the added benefit of taking off your HD eyesight for a while. just. fuck it! i'm done. 240p vision time

I've seen enough.

so my tumblr app is doing this fun thing where it just shows me empty posts sometimes, because why not. and this one just really worked for me.

The real tragedy of Dune (which the movies did an excellent job of portraying) is that almost none of the characters we see have any real choice in what they do. The only choices they have are in how they do them.

Duke Leto must take House Atreides to Arrakis, or be declared a traitor to the Imperium and hunted down. He knows it's a trap and that the Emperor is, in the very best case scenario, setting him and his family up for a serious reversal of their fortunes (far more likely, he's outright scheming to get them killed). But he doesn't have a choice. He must go to Arrakis. He does go to Arrakis. He dies.

Paul and Jessica must flee into the desert or the Harkonnen soldiers will kill them both brutally. They must go to the Fremen for refuge or the desert will kill them. They go. They find that the Fremen have already begun to mythologise Paul. He's the Mahdi, the Lisan al-Gaib. There is no option for Paul to be a normal person here. He is either the messiah or he is a false prophet, and false prophets in a nation of true believers don't live for long.

So Paul fits himself into the mold of the myth. He becomes Muad'dib and leads the Fremen in war because they believe too much in him to let him be anything less. Is it manipulation? Yes. But because the Bene Gesserit have been manipulating the Fremen for centuries, Paul has no choice but to continue it if he wants to live.

He sees the holy war at the end of every timeline by glimpses and he fights to avoid it. To avoid it, he becomes the Kwizatz Haderach and gains the ability to fully see timelines, and thereby he makes himself that much more of the Fremen messiah and brings himself one step closer to the holy war. Every choice he makes is a choice for survival and an attempt to avoid that war, the war he cannot escape because every step he makes along the path to survival is one more step towards the war. He has no more choice in what he becomes than his father had in whether or not he went to Arrakis.

The only people who ever had a choice were the Emperor and Gaius Helen Mohiam. They made their choice, to exterminate House Atreides, and thereby they took everyone's choices away, including their own. Once they sent House Atreides to Arrakis, the entire plot was inevitable.

Paul Atreides walking silhouette compilation in DUNE PART TWO (2024)

Traditional names

I've seen so many people surprised why would someone living thousands of years from now has such an ordinary names like Paul or Jessica. Like we didn't call our kids now Adam or Jason. Like they forgot Diana and Brigid where goddesses. Not everyone needs to be named Irulan or Feyd-Rautha. It's not unusual for names to be passed through history and generations. And this mix of familiar and strange seems pretty true how this always worked.

i think it's fucked up that there are plants that decided they wanted to eat meat

a plant's job is literally to just exist but the venus flytrap chose violence

what if i gently laid an uncooked steak on the soil for it to absorb

my tree biology teacher fed her calcium-deficient tree a whole-ass bbq rib bone - she stuck it in the ground near the base of the tree (after eating the meat off of it), and when she came back to collect it to show the tree biology class it was GONE

the tree had grown a root up through the center of it & out through the sides

also there’s an old story about a man who was buried beneath a tree, and when they went to exhume the body it had been completely absorbed by the tree’s roots- you could see the shape of the body in the way the roots grew, splitting up for clearly defined arms and legs. trees will absolutely eat a steak if you bury it & they need the nutrients.

that’s horrifying! thank you

The nutrients a plant needs have to come from somewhere. For most plants that's the soil - usually decaying plants and animals and such but they don't actually have to be decomposed first. For example, if you want to grow an organic flower garden, especially roses, you'll want to feed them blood. (It doesn't need to be fresh, don't worry, plenty of garden stores sell blood meal.) Different parts of the plant use different proportions of nutrients (and yes, that includes calcium from bones).

Carnivorous plants are just doing the same thing in environments where there's so much water that it leeches nutrients out of the soil, so to compensate they just adapt to catch their nutrient sources before they can decay and their nutrients can be dissolved and washed away. (That's why most carnivorous plants are native to bogs and rainforests. Plants in other places just don't need to put so much energy into securing animals to eat.)

@botanicallyinclinednerd

“no matter how badly you think you’re doing it, someone else has done it a lot worse and been fine” is applicable to a wide, wide range of things and i say it to myself all the time

"bigger idiots than me have done it" is a phrase I live by

i see a capybara and my brain goes “capybapy” and there’s nothing i can do about it

just to clarify things

BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER | 7.05, Selfless

Reading a book on sea monsters on ancient maps and I thought this was such a funny way to put it. They couldn’t even afford sea monsters :///

“Don’t take it personally” How would you like me to take it then? Professionally? Romantically? Academically?

theoretically? aesthetically? metaphorically? existentially? metaphysically?

The internet trauma dumped on poor Elmo

And Sesame Street said "Y'all need therapy."

Oh, wait. Then Sesame Street said, "We're still here for you." 🥹

“that sounds like a you problem” is literally one of the funniest ways to respond to criticism

(Paraphrased from Elrond) "I would rather that the youngest remain here for my heart forbids him going."

Clearly, this would have been foreshadowing of Pippin's death in the final battle since Tolkien originally planned for him to die and Elrond is meant to have some ability to see into the future.

Thankfully, Tolkien changed his mind on that. But the line still is so layered that it works despite that aspect. Elrond has seen too much of war and evil and wants to spare the one who's barely even an adult from it if he can. His fatherly instincts simply forbid sending Pippin without fighting to keep him safe. He's already grown fond of all of them but especially Pippin and wants to keep one loved one alive. If I recall rightly, Elrond was the older twin, so Pippin may remind him of his younger brother and he wants to keep this one safe.

So many ways this could be taken.