Flux Construct

I’m sorry, I can’t come into work today. I didn’t get a long rest and god gave me a point of exhaustion. All my skill checks are at disadvantage.

The hobbits invent a fun game called ‘how close can we get to our friends before they notice us’

easy mode: Gimli (makes a lot of noise himself, very easy to sneak up on)

medium mode: Boromir (challenging enough to be great fun)

hard more: Aragorn (VERY attentive to his surroundings)

expert mode: Legolas

it takes them a LONG time to get Legolas but Frodo eventually manages it and it’s magnificent

Legolas: *sitting around minding his own business*

Frodo: *two inches from his ear* hi Legolas what’s up

Legolas: ANDAGNDOAHGDLKHNKDLFHLKFDANGLKFDAGN????? *backflips to his feet in confusion*

*cue the rest of the fellowship losing their fucking minds*

after that he’s onto them and they never manage it again

from all i can gather this is entirely cannon except the fellowship hobbits didnt invent it, its been a traditional hobbit game on par with humans and ‘tag’ for about 500 plus years to the point the average human will routinely fail to notice an entire picnic of hobbits at ten feet, blanket and potato salad included like hobbits dont realize they legit have a supernatural ability to not be noticed on par with elves physics bending sniper scope vision

okay but is “picnic” the collective noun for hobbits because that’s brilliant

a picnic of hobbits

perfection

So yeah, it’s canon that hobbits are the stealthiest of the races of Middle-Earth, even more so than elves. Which is an amusing trivia fact, until you start realizing how much of the plot of both The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings is based on this.

Why did Gandalf randomly decide that a plump gentle-hobbit was the right person to be a burglar for an adventuring party? It seems like wizardly eccentricity, until you realize Bilbo’s got a racial bonus to Stealth of like +20. Why does he get the Ring? In text, it’s partly coincidence, but also - which party member do you give your Ring of Invisibility to? The Rogue with a crazy Stealth bonus, of course. Bilbo uses his Stealth, boosted by the Ring, constantly, and the dwarves would have been dead a dozen times over without it. He’s able to get the Ring in the first place because he stealthed out of the middle of a horde of goblins. Then he’s sneaking up inches from trolls, secretly living inside the elves’ freakin palace (with Legolas) for months, rescuing a whole pack of dwarves from under the elves’ noses, regularly pick-pocketing people including elves, sneaking past a dragon, sneaking to deliver the Arkenstone.

Then we follow up into Lord of the Rings. Gandalf’s now bred up a second-generation Rogue. Frodo, Sam, Pippin, and Merry have that same massive racial Stealth bonus, and Frodo also has been raised by an adventurer. He speaks Elvish fluently, he’s friends with dwarves, he studies maps obsessively. Then he inherits Bilbo’s Stealth-boosting magic item - now upgraded to cursed McGuffin. When Gandalf decides it’s time, he collects Frodo and assembles a party. Their goal isn’t to march into Mordor, or to battle the Boss: it’s to sneak through enemy lines, past an entire army (or two).

The humans, elf, dwarf, and wizard angel keep drawing too much attention and getting them attacked (plus admittedly Pippin, the low-WIS darling), so eventually Frodo and Sam ditch them and head off on a pure stealth run. They can’t use the Ring of Invisibility anymore, but fortunately Galadriel gave them another Stealth-boosting magic item, the cloaks. They sneak halfway across Middle-Earth, past armies, through miles and miles of enemy territory, while being hunted by every evil being on the planet, particularly a literal giant All-Seeing Eye. Not to mention the Palantiri, extremely powerful divination items which are being actively used by three different groups of enemies/competitors.

The other main canonical Hobbit power is that they’re “very hardy folk”, meaning they have incredibly high resistance to various things from poison to mental influence. So they can survive the literally poisonous air and water of Mordor, which was designed to kill every species but orcs. And they can survive close contact with the Ring for decades or centuries, not only physically but also maintaining some degree of mental independence, when any other race would succumb in minutes to hours. (Note the most “powerful” characters - Elrond, Galadriel, the literal angel Gandalf - refuse to even touch the Ring, as do the most morally sound, Aragorn and Faramir.)

Why did Gandalf choose a minor member of the country gentry, the size of a toddler, with no combat training, to save Middle-Earth? Because absolutely no other creature on the planet could have done the task. Frodo was all but created as a weapon against Sauron. He, and he alone (with Sam), was capable of saving Middle-Earth.

TL;DR: Legolas would get jump-scared by Frodo every single time, because Frodo is the greatest Rogue in Middle-Earth, and the plot of the entire series depends on that fact.

Gonna print this out and staple it to the face of the next person who asks why they didn’t just give the ring to the eagles to drop into the volcano. BECAUSE POISONOUS AIR AND AN ARMY WITH TREBUCHETS YOU TWIT.

Also Sméagol/Gollum, mentioned by Gandalf to be a hobbit or close relative of hobbits.  The elves can’t catch him in Mirkwood, and this is after he lost the Ring and is out in the open for the first time in ~500 years.

i luv this concept so much lmao

just the idea of the hobbits playing hide and seek with the rest of the fellowship is so hilarious to me 

@unsteady-states !!!

It bugs me a little bit that The Ring canonically turned Isildur invisible.

Canonically, The Ring’s whole thing is that it enhances the pre-existing abilities of whomever wears it, in addition to driving them insane. This is why it would be so devastating for Gandalf, or Galadriel, etc to get their hands on it. They’re already super powerful, the buff would make them unstoppable.

And the stealth thing is established really early on in the Hobbit as the thing hobbits were amazing at. It would kick ass as a detail for The Ring to only turn Hobbits invisible. Among other points, it enhances the plot-point of Gandalf not being able to recognize the thing and then after his suspicions were raised taking so much time studying ring-lore before he could. If The Ring only turned Hobbits invisible, then Gandalf literally has nothing to go off of for identifying the damn thing until he’s gotten his PHD in Ring-ology. Which is canonically what it took for him to figure it out.

This is still plausible without the alteration to The Ring’s exact properties, but I feel that the narrative is a bit stronger with it.

Amusingly, as far as I can tell its also canon-compliant.

What the fuck does that mean, didn’t I already say that Isildur is canonically turned invisible by The Ring? Ah, but you misunderstand the nature of Tolkien’s canon. The Hobbit exists within the fiction of The Hobbit. It is written by Bilbo, with Tolkien himself merely translating it from Westron to modern English. The Lord of The Rings is compiled by Frodo, the Silmarillion is a Noldor history book.

We know that The Ring turned Isildur invisible because of how he died; his party was ambushed on the road by orcs. Isildur donned The Ring and leapt into the river to escape. But The Ring betrayed him, enlarging itself on his finger and falling off, thus allowing the orcs to see him and fill him with arrows.

Except.

That’s the translation of what happened, and we don’t know how reliable the original source was in any case. Recall that ordinary humans are already remarkably resistant to death by injuries that would fell other creatures, and Isidur was a full-blooded Numenorean besides. It is entirely plausible that The Rings enhancement of these properties would make Isildur very difficult to kill indeed. Maybe he was already full of arrows when he went into the River, but his wounds only became fatal retroactively, with the loss of The Ring.

Perhaps the “original text” Watsonian-Tolkien was translating more simply indicated that Isildur went into the river, was betrayed by The Ring, and this caused his immediate death-by-arrows. Watsonian-Tolkien could, in this case, be forgiven for assuming that it was a matter of loosing the invisibility which The Ring emparts to so many Hobbits in the texts Watsonian-Tolkien has read which led to Isildur’s death.

Alternatively, it could have been the mistake of an earlier chronicler or transcriber whose error Watsonian-Tolkien was simply passing on.

speechless. the pose. the expression. this should be a painting.

i'm no good at painting sorry. i have excessive line work instead

(free pattern here!)

Sabatons are armoured footwear worn as part of a complete suit of amour. This pair of authentic German gothic sabatons are from 1490.

grinch armor

Surely for show only?

Certainly for horseback only; the long points - imitating fashionable ‘Crakow’ or ‘Poulaine’ civilian shoes - were often / usually removable for wear on foot.

Crakow and Poulaine both suggest “in the Polish style”, though whether that was an accurate representation of contemporary shoe styles from Poland or was one of those not-really-from-there labels like “Swiss cheese” or “English muffin”, I don’t know.

The other word for foot armour is solleret and, as usual with arms and armour, definitions vary: in two sources on my shelves, (”European Armour” © 1958 Claude Blair and “Arms & Armour of the Medieval Knight” © 1988 David Edge & John Miles Paddock) it’s stated that sabaton was the English word while solleret was the French word.

OR according to ”Arms & Armor” © 1975 Johannes Schöbel tr. M. Stanton / also WikiDiff.com, a sabaton was an extension of the leg armour…

…while a solleret was a separate armoured shoe (or vice versa)…

But according to ”A Dictionary of Chivalry” © 1968 Grant Uden, a solleret was pointed…

…while a sabaton was rounded or square-toed (or vice versa).

The only thing I’m absolutely sure of is that, since they were based on civilian fashions, pointy was earlier than blunt.

Writer note: pick either sabaton or solleret and stick to it. Swapping between them to prove you know both will not only confuse your readers but ultimately confuse you.

Here’s a pair of original Eisenschuhe (”iron shoes” - bless German for being so literal, since the term refers equally to round, square and pointy armoured footwear) which belonged to Emperor Maximilian I…

…and here’s a pair of reproductions showing how the points came off. They were still pretty pointy underneath, but no so much that the wearer had to move like someone wearing skis or swim-fins.

The Amazon grocery stores which touted an AI system that tracked what you put in your cart so you didn't have to go through checkout were actually powered by underpaid workers in India.

A great many AI products are just schemes to shift labor costs to more exploitable workers. There may indeed be a neural net involved in the data processing pipeline, but most products need a vast and underpaid labor force to handle its nearly innumerable errors.

This is half of AI products : outsourced sweatshops of people looking at screens. Tesla's "self driving" is a building full of people identifying stop signs and traffic lights.

It's ethical to hire people to do your food, be your driver, do your admin, sort your mess, make decisions, make art. The driver from Parasite resented being treated like dirt and the isolation of his boss, not his job as a driver.

The point of AI is to obfuscate people, the real people who make the world go round, to pretend there is no-one under the mechanical turk so you don't question why it's so cheap

and don't get to question when 'the machine' hurts you.

(The other half of AI is generators that *do* work and *do* make interesting things but took stolen or sweatshop labour to develop into a working generator)

Wells are a type of wizard tower, they're just inverted

If it were up to him, His Highness would never go to the Cherry Blossom palace. Too bad he's on a deadline now.

Yeah quiet quitting is great and all but have you tried chaotic working?

Like. I remember back in my grocery store cashier days I did so much crazy shit.

When WIC (Women, infants, and children voucher program to help low income mothers/families with children) people were in my line I would pretty much know who they were. Before the cards they had to tell us upfront they were WIC and show us their vouchers for what they were allowed to get (it was awful some times. Like. 2 gallons of milk. $4 worth of vegetables etc etc). They’d always have items hanging back, waiting to see what the total was and if they would have to take it off the belt.

I began to place the fruits/vegetables a certain way on the register scale so that like 1/2lbs of grapes read as like .28lbs or something. Then act shocked when I said that they still had X amount of lbs left. They got all their fruit and vegetables.

I think it started to kinda? Catch on to the women? Because I would have the same moms in my line month after month. And even after they switched to the cards (they worked like food stamp cards?) I’d still do the same thing. They were able to get more produce for whatever shitty max amount Indiana gave them.

Anyways. Be chaotic. It’s more fun that way.

this is amazing. It achieves the goal of a strike while putting all the bad stuff (lost time and money, bad rep) sorely on the parts of the bosses and owners. I know that a lot of regular people aren't fond of strikes because they make their lives harder (which is understandable).

i think the single greatest example of environmental storytelling in video games is in Unpacking. it's a game with no dialogue that consists entirely of unpacking your stuff out of moving boxes and placing it into the correct places around the place your character is moving into. there are a lot of subtle storytelling beats, like the same stuffed animal coming with you through every single move, but there's one level in particular that takes place right after your character graduates college and moves in with her boyfriend that goes normally at first.

but then you get to your framed diploma.

you go to hang it on the wall in the kitchen, but there's a bigass painting already there that you can't move (presumably your boyfriends) that takes up the entire wall.

you go to hang it on the wall in the living room, but there are already a bunch of posters there - again, presumably your boyfriend's. there's clearly space for your diploma if the posters were scooched closer together, but again, you can't even move them.

with a growing sense of dread and desperation, you move to the bathroom. this room has the only wall space in the apartment for you to hang your diploma: directly over the toilet.

but if you try to place it there, it gets a red outline, indicating that it's in the "wrong" spot and the level won't finish.

you go to the bedroom.

there is no wall space.

you click under the bed.

the level finishes.

the next level has you moving back into your childhood bedroom.

The whole damn game is so good at this, but god this whole level was a gut punch. Even fitting your books and toys and keepsakes in around the boyfriend's apartment is a bitch and you end up having to stack books under the coffee table and shit too. It ends on a much happier note though. I cried the first time I played it, and now I play it regularly as a comfort thing.

Antoni Fabrés - L'esmolet (1890s)

Its usual English title is "The Knife Grinder", though the literal meaning is probably more something like "The Blade Grinder / Sharpener". However itinerant knife-grinders used to be one of various tradespeople who went door-to-door, so the default name has stuck.

Not many knives around here.

Identifying the swords is fun, though, and good eye-memory coordination.

There are all sorts of goodies, from Pappenheimers and Walloon pallasches to Italian cup-hilts, as well as that Spanish cup-hilt (with a heavy military blade rather than the usual thin one) which he's sharpening.

There are even a couple of bilbos - which, though the name means "a sword from Bilbao", will get you far more wrong hits than right ones unless you frame the search terms Just Right.

No prizes for guessing why. :->

I have a feeling the artist may have asked his local museum if he could sketch a selection of 17th-century swords, was unable to decide which one he liked best, and thought of a composition that allowed him to include the lot.

I can't blame him, not one bit. :->

as much as I will fight and die for found family I kind of do love Dungeon Meshi’s found coworker dynamic. Like typically when most media tries to pull the “and then they all went their seperate ways” ending it feels super hollow and sad but the dungeon meshi gang’s dynamic is balanced super well as people who do in fact like each other and do in fact get along well, but at the same time know absolutely nothing abt each other and cannot be in close proximity to each other for too long outside of work without maiming each other. I 100% believe that in the end those dudes all just went “well good work team” and split and only see each other every couple of years for reunions.

Masterpost

@nakakapagpabagabaggabagag for your question

i'd ride this.

via birdhism

It's incredible how people have been protesting pants and skirts not having pockets but not a single peep is heard over the fact that skirts no longer have underskirts by default. Underskirts (or lining) was a thing when I was a child, no skirt would be made without lining, you didn't have to think and check if your whole ass is visible in a skirt because lining was a thing!!!! Now most skirts don't and it's simply because it's cheaper, fuck the fact that a customer doesn't want their panties shown in broad daylight, it saves a couple of cents on material.

okay so this has definitely breached containment and I want to point something out:

Snake man.

I've posted a new illustration to my Patreon! Full size JPG, PSD and video files can be downloaded according to the amount of support. https://www.patreon.com/satoshi_matsuura