Riok Ollivier

To anyone who believes fairy tale romances never happen in real life, may I remind you that JRR and Edith Tolkien met and experienced a forbidden love in their youth, and then were separated for five whole years because of his guardian’s rules that he could not date till he was 21, and she got engaged to someone else only because she assumed he’d forgotten her and lost hope that she could ever be with him, but then on his 21st birthday, he wrote her a letter saying he still loved her and wanted to marry her, she responded basically saying ‘if I’d known you hadn’t left me on the shelf, I would never have said yes to anyone else,’ then a week later she greeted him at the train station and then immediately dumped her fiancé, and they got married and she converted to his religion and danced for him in a flowering field far away from the trenches into which he was drafted, which left such an impression that he crafted an entire story about the most beautiful maiden in the world who danced in the woods and made enormous sacrifices to be with the man she loved, and they had four kids and remained faithful to each other and blissfully grew old together and their gravestones are now marked with the names of that same fictional couple that he created, who broke every rule and overcame every possible obstacle to be together and get a happy ending, who only did all that because he based it all on their own real love story.

Knowing all this has always made this bit of Beren’s song instantly reduce me to tears:

Tolkien straight up wrote a poem that said “the world could end, but it wouldn’t have all been pointless, because she was in this world, however briefly, and that justified all the rest.” Kills me.

Who can outdo Wife Guy Tolkien? Dude was writing elaborate AUs where his wife is an impossibly beautiful magic-wielding immortal elf princess who fights Satan and wins to rescue her human boyfriend from Satan’s doom fortress. Flawless.

Welcome to the Protestant Work Ethic where if you are not working for 16 hours a day you are a Sinner that will Burn In Hell. Unless of course you are rich in which case you are Blessed by God and can go to Heaven without lifting a finger.

heard a story on a podcast that some Christian missionaries showed these rural Cambodian farmers how to double their crop yields. the missionaries came back a year later and were surprised the Cambodians had grown basically the same amount of crops but the farmers were like “yeah this is great, we got everything we need for the year and only had to do half as much work”

and if that doesn't tell you everything you need to know about the current North American work environment I don't know what will

All eyes on Palestine!

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Really beating the "you've built a concentration camp" accusations about gaza threatening to send inconvenient political dissidents there as a form of punishment aren't'cha?

Using our taxes to pay for services we need will not bankrupt the country.

Tax breaks for the wealthy and needless wars using borrowed money will bankrupt the country.

you ever know someone and you think “god i love you. i wish we could’ve known eachother when we were carefree and 11. i wish we could’ve played together as kids”

I’ve seen several media outlets trying to claim that the UN has ‘quietly’ halved the number of Palestinian women and children killed since October 7th. Some have gone so far as to allege that Hamas fabricated the original numbers to try and cover for the 1:1 ratio of insurgents to civilians killed.

They’ve chosen to ignore the fact that the UN published a completely separate report, comprised of individuals whose remains have been identified.

The UN has clarified that the total number of women and children killed in Gaza since October 7th remains unchanged.

ok but we're all missing the important question here... WHO in the vatican has taught the spanish-speaking pope how to say faggotry in italian. how on earth did it come up. was it a prank. was it political sabotage. is there homosexual tomfoolery afoot in santa marta. I need to know more

your holiness did you perchance say FAGGOTRY

I can't stress enough how much in my decades living gayly in Italy I have never ever heard a straight person say frociaggine. Only the gays say it. WHO TAUGHT HIM

Glad you two are having fun http://dlvr.it/T6qbwn

Wonder how long before the Israeli media tries to claim that these folks were affiliated with Hamas.