Thorin Oakenshield, son of Thráin II, grandson of Thrór & King Under The Mountain 👑

A week ago I rewatched The Hobbit and all my love for the grumpy dwarf king came back full force. So I had to draw him ♡

If you notice me reblogging

please let me know, you’re not rude or annoying and I actually do give a fuck and I will correct my mistake, thank you

and AI art!!!

Doing more than one? Choose whichever you found the most helpful. ❤️

in between by Sylvia L. (Weissglut)

“Authors should not be ALLOWED to write about–” you are an anti-intellectual and functionally a conservative

“This book should be taken off of shelves for featuring–” you are an anti-intellectual and functionally a conservative

“Schools shouldn’t teach this book in class because–” you are an anti-intellectual and functionally a conservative

“Nobody actually likes or wants to read classics because they’re–” you are an anti-intellectual and an idiot

“I only read YA fantasy books because every classic novel or work of literary fiction is problematic and features–” you are an anti-intellectual and you are robbing yourself of the full richness of the human experience.

"you are functionally a conservative" is such a good and clarifying insult

Literally right after I saw this post, I saw another post in a discord chat for BOOK EDITORS in which an outspokenly liberal editor talked about how Nabokov should have never been published because he wrote about p*dophiles and described women's bodies in ways that made her uncomfortable. She described his writing as "objectively terrible" and said she wanted to burn his books. And other editors were bringing up classics they didn't like and talking about how they wanted to throw them in the trash. This wasn't like a light "unpopular opinion!" conversation. This was actual book editors talking about how books should be destroyed and censored.

There is something so scary and toxic in global culture right now. The revival of fascism is influencing everyone's mindset and approach to art, regardless of where they fall on the political spectrum.

I see far more books being censored today than when I was a kid. Librarians handed me The Catcher in the Rye, The Sexual Politics of Meat, and Animal Farm when I was literally 8-11. My mom would never have taken a book away from me. I read everything from the Tao Te Ching to the Qur'an to atheist texts under my desk at school. Teachers thought nothing of it or encouraged it. Books seemed universally acknowledged as sacrosanct to me.

Now I can't find any adults who don't hesitate or want to make exceptions when it comes to censorship. Even the most liberal social activist librarians I know go, "well except for book X..."

Functionally conservative. It's so important to have the language to express that.

Thank you for this addition!

And, following up on the previous post …

“This makes me uncomfortable” is NOT a valid reason for censorship

These fucking book editors should remove themselves from the profession ASAP 😡

The only reason a book should be removed, the ONLY reason, is “we are keeping it in the restricted section for research because its only intended function is to cause harm.”

And to be clear, when I say this, I’m talking about shit like To Train Up A Child and The Protocols of Zion. One is a text responsible for the deaths of multiple children because it’s an abuse how-to, and the other is entirely fabricated “protocols” from a group that never actually existed but is claimed to represent all Jews, and it’s basically one long antisemitic screed.

And even these should be available. Just. Not where they’re gonna be used to start a white supremacist cult.

We had a copy of Hitler's autobiography Mein Kampf on the shelves in my primary school's library. It was in a restricted section, i.e. books you could only borrow with adult supervision, if you had to write an essay on Nazism or Hitler for example, but it was there. In perfectly plain view, sitting on a shelf, while first graders checked out Asterix comics and odd nerds read The Silmarillion over on the couches (it's me, I am odd nerds).

That book is Nazi propaganda, an utterly incoherent anti-semitic screed full of fascist talking points, and its contents are, objectively speaking, dangerous. It is a book that calls for society-scale genocidal bigotry, and all of its pages are bent towards making that argument as persuasively as it can.

And yet, there it was, in plain view of children in a primary school, because what the teachers at my school understood is that, first of all, kids don't really give that much of a shit about a fascist's masturbatory autobiography, not when there's Asterix available.

And second, that what children need is not to be hermetically sealed away from all forms of harmful media for fear that they be corrupted, what they need is to learn to navigate harmful media, to read it critically, to process the awful things inside of it and come out the other side without being persuaded to do or think something horrible.

Children need - and I mean need - to learn the skills to do this, because otherwise they grow up into adults with no defenses against propaganda and misinformation, i.e. the exact kind of angry, terrified, flailing mob that gets persuaded to assault a nation's capitol when an election doesn't go their way.

Nobody is immune to propaganda and anyone can fall deep into a conspiracy hole, but there are levels of resistance to those things a person can develop.

And the only way to develop resistance is to be exposed to it!

It's a necessary part of the process, it is mandatory, you have to be exposed to it so you can learn what it is and how to deal with it. And either that exposure happens in a controlled learning environment, with trained teachers helping someone through it, or it happens in an uncontrolled environment to a person who has never learned how to understand what they're looking at.

None of this means that everyone should be reading Mein Kampf to their kids or w/e, but it means that the attitude of "ban this filth!" only plays into the hands of people who actually are trying to corrupt people morally.

Americans accepted the fake backstory to Iron Chef in part bc they didn't know the Chairman was an actor but also it commits so thoroughly to its kayfabe that yeah. If an eccentric rich man was going to create a place for chefs to duel it would look like this. I wish we lived in the world where rich people were making Kitchen Stadia

Also bc none of our reality shows get kayfabe. We have the banker in Deal or No Deal and that's it. Jeopardy! should start with a backstory about how steel magnate Frank Jeopardy created it as an arena to find the one true trivia master. But it doesn't

okay now y’all wanna hear how i somehow came out as trans to my mom 4 years before i knew it myself

so i was TRYING to come out as bisexual. i just somehow managed to become an oracle at the same time

so i gave my mother this note (yes it’s framed in my room):

so anyway that day she bid farewell to my heterosexuality but little did anyone know (least of all me) she’d be saying goodbye to the daughter part one day too lol. surprise <3

you know what, 10k notes and I’ll make a shirt with this pic on it and wear it in public

IT’S BEEN 2 MINUTES

Oromë + 11 for hatteeho with bonus tiny Tyelko

would you like a nice glass of

yknow i never noticed the sheer rareness of images having ids or alt text on this website until i started adding alt text to my art (and trying to remember to add it to any images i post in general, especially text screenshots) and that makes me kinda sad

I feel like a lot of people just don't know how to do it or are intimidated by the prospect. I was too, actually, and I couldn't find any good guides on how to do it (beyond basic formatting) and most guides boiled down to "just describe what you see and important details!" I really wanted to add alt text bc accessibility is important to me, but I would always get kinda stumped on how to do it.

But then I saw this image, I think in a discord server, and I immediately started doing it. It kinda broke the ice for me

Why not order them now, or set a phone reminder for a more convenient time to do that?