first 5 faceless emojis are how your summers gonna go

Magnus Archives fan I see

THIS IS SO FUNNY I'M SORRY

apparently i’m a millennial woman

I mean, yeah, valid! but but but I also want to add on the fact that lotr AGGRESSIVELY rejects the “grimdark” and “gritty” settings that is so prevalent in fantasy (and also in general) right now, because I physically can not shut up about it

It is hope and love and compassion that saves each character individually, and because of that, the world. Frodo fails in the end, but his acts of compassion from earlier in the story save the day. And even as the world is saved, it is acknowledged that Frodo failed—without judgement, without blame. He fails, and he is still loved.

And like what can happen in the real world, he is still irrevocably changed by his trauma. But there is still hope—he has to leave, but he leaves with the promise of healing, and the promise that his ever-faithful Sam will follow.

Aragorn, Boromir, Frodo, Sam; each and every one of the characters are driven by their love of the people around them and their hope for the future. They cling to that love and hope throughout their trials, and that bears them through.

Of course people are watching it for comfort!!!! Lotr is eternally consistent in its promise, which Sam articulates so clearly in The Two Towers: “Even darkness must pass. A new day will come. And when the sun shines, it’ll shine out the clearer.”

Things are dark and awful and terrible, but it will not be that way forever. That is the promise of LOTR. A promise of hope, and the reminder that it is love and compassion—for our friends, for our families, for the strangers we’ve never even met—that will save us in the end.

MOST BASS ARE JUST FISH BUT LEROY BROWN WAS SOMETHING SPECIAL

Leroy Brown has been haunting me, so I looked into his backstory and it's wilder than you could possibly imagine.

Leroy Brown was about one pound when he was caught in 1973 in Lake Eufala, Alabama, by Tom Mann, who is absolutely legendary in the world of bass fishing. Instead of releasing or taking him home to eat, Mann decided he recognized a spark of something special in the fish, so he took him home and popped him in his backyard pond. Later, he moved the fish to a giant aquarium in his workshop. He was an aggressive fish, so he got named after the song. And Mann loved this fish. He trained him to jump through a hoop, he hand-fed him, he would talk about him to anybody. The fish became internationally known, with publicity in Russia, South Africa, Australia, and other countries.

Then, in 1980, the fish dies- probably of old age. So what to do? Have a funeral. Various sources say between 500 and 1,200 people came (there was a very large bass fishing tournament that weekend), and the local marching band was there to play "Bad, Bad Leroy Brown" as the fish's tiny casket was lowered into his grave.

But then things got really wild. On the day of the funeral, it was eventually decided that the ground was too wet and muddy, so Mann put the fish and his casket (actually a satin-lined tackle box full of one dead fish and the lure he was caught with) in the freezer.

That night, somebody stole the dead fish and his tiny casket.

Seriously. This was not a taxidermy fish, this was just. Y'know. A dead fish, with all of the smells that entails.

Three weeks later, the tackle box turns up at the Tulsa, Oklahoma airport. A baggage handler found it, and it was decided that the box full of three-week-old decaying Leroy was too nasty to ship back to Alabama. The statue remained at Fish World, which is where the public could visit Leroy during his life, until 2005, when Tom Mann died and the facility was closed. (Fish World was like... a weird museum/facility to learn about bass fishing. Mann wasn't just an expert angler, he also designed some of the most popular lures that are still used in bass fishing, as well as the Humminbird depth finder- still the most popular depth finder brand on the market. So he had this workshop/lure lab there and people could come see his stuff but also learn about how to go bass fishing and how to do bass fishing as a sport.) The statue went to another bass fisherman, until the city of Eufala asked for it back in 2016. Now it sits prominently on Main Street, reminding everyone that most bass are just fish, but Leroy Brown was something special.

LEROY BROWN UPDATE

I found a picture from his funeral!

From left to right: Tom Mann, Leroy Brown (deceased), Ray Scott

Ray Scott was the president of the Bass Anglers Sportsman Society, and was the person who had the Leroy statue from 2005-2016.

I am still trying to track down images of Leroy when he was alive. There should be some, as the fish had editorials in Southern Living and a couple of other magazines, but those may take longer to find. For now, enjoy this image of Leroy laid to rest, covered by the only artificial lure he ever struck: Mann's coveted strawberry worms.

Tom Mann's memoir, Think Like A Fish, is up on the Internet Archive. While it doesn't have any photos (or at least, the edition that's online doesn't), Chapter 11, which is about Leroy, implies that there may be video evidence of this fish!

I really hope I can find some old commercials. Leroy was the only small fish in the entire tank, so if these commercials still exist, and if there's a small largemouth bass in them, we'll have moving images of this fish!

FOUND HIM

I couldn't find any of the old TV spots, but I did find this ad for Mann's Jelly Worm, featuring the legend himself!

There he is! In the four pictures to the left, that's Leroy Brown! Look at him, being extremely suspicious of that bait! Mann notes in his memoir that while Leroy Brown would hit plastic bait, he'd never take it- in other words, he'd bite, but if it had a hook, he wouldn't swallow. Instead, he'd swim with it:

I am officially declaring this investigation into the life and times of Leroy Brown complete. We've seen his memorial, we've learned about his life, we've marveled at his post-mortem kidnapping, and now we've seen pictures of him both dead and alive. The only thing I have left to show is this: the merch.

Oh yeah, there was merch. Specifically, the Leroy Brown crankbait and the Leroy Brown belt buckle:

If you want to see more about the lure, including watching a guy fish with it, there's a youtube video from a fella who does a lot of fishing with vintage/retro lures.

I feel enriched for having learned so much about bad, bad Leroy Brown.

PRINCESS MONONOKE 1997 | dir. Hayao Miyazaki

there's been a lot of obnoxious pop history trends in the last few years but the bizarre total sanitization of vikings/pirates has to be one of the worst. like sorry to the queer neopagan anarchy symbol in bio twitter user community but like. are you aware both vikings and pirates enthusiastically traded slaves

and to be clear i'm not calling people out for liking the aesthetic or being into historical fiction or whatever i'm specifically talking about the genre of post that's like "it's crazy how most people think vikings were violent raiders when they were actually antiracist feminist sheep herders living in free love communes and operating dog shelters"

I think this comes from an inability people have to, like, be moderate on things.

The initial failure to be moderate comes the traditional received view, e.g. "the Vikings were all horrible barbarians who did nothing but raid and pillage and be evil". Then someone comes along and, rightly, tries to question this view. They say "hey, the Vikings were just people like you and me. Maybe they even did some things that are worth admiring, you know. Maybe we've been treating them unfairly." And this catches on, especially as the original power dynamics that motivated the received view start to fade (slander of Vikings has a lot less motivation when the Catholic church stops being so politically relevant). And people are often inclined to use these other, traditionally maligned societies as foils to critique their own society. And so it becomes widely accepted among the sort of people who consider themselves smart and thoughtful that the Vikings really weren't as bad as they've been made out to be; they've been unfairly maligned. They were just people, like you and me.

Except here comes the second failure to be moderate, when the view slowly morphs into "the Vikings were right about everything, Viking society was so much better than modern society" etc. And that's where you get these twitter leftists, who are somewhere down the second-failure-to-be-moderate telephone line.

Anyway, I'm responding to this post, and respond to many like it, in an attempt to preempt what I have often seen as an inchoate third failure to be moderate, a return to the received narrative that the Vikings just totally sucked, man. No, no! I'm not accusing OP of this specifically (I don't think they're guilty of it), but it is... in the air, around these parts.

Moderation! Moderation! Nuance! Be careful lest you become what you sought to destroy!

(Tags from @tarantula-hawk-wasp :

#tbh this is the hardest part about teaching any type of history bc people want to either valorize or vilify and like no!! #seek truth not goodness in the past #no society is free of sin and no society is free of merit #but that shouldn't be your goal in learning about them - it should be understanding)

floating duck 🍑⁣

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: A tweet by Twitter user @1Schoolhouse reads, "I know I don't look disabled. This may surprise you, but most of my body is on the inside… where you can't see it."

Photographers all know about polarizing filters. They remove reflections off the surfaces of objects. We use them to see into water or windows that are obscured by those reflections. But anything with an even slightly glossy surface has a layer of reflection on top. So if you have a shiny green plant, it can remove the shiny and reveal a very saturated green underneath. Polarizers also remove a lot of scattered and reflected light from the sky. Which reveals a deep blue color you didn't even know was there.

Here is a photo I took of my circular polarizer.

And the first thing I noticed when walking outside during the eclipse was the color of everything was more saturated, just like in that circle. Apparently, an eclipse significantly reduces polarized light and I got this creepy feeling because I was only ever used to seeing the world like that through the viewfinder of my camera.

The other thing I noticed was my outdoor lights. I leave them on all the time because I never remember to turn them on at night. And usually the sun will render them barely visible during the day. On a very sunny day they almost look like they are off.

But you can clearly see they are shining and even flaring the camera during the eclipse.

Our eyes adjust to lighting changes very well so it was hard to tell how much dimmer things were, but that is a good indication. I took this photo a few minutes ago and you can see how dim the lights appear after the moon has fucked off.

I did a calculation using the exposure settings between these two photos. The non-eclipse photo has 7 f-stops more light. That is 128 times or 12,700% more light.

A partial Pringle eclipse cut the sun's light by 99.2% and somehow our eyes adjusted to make it seem like a normal sunny day (with weird ass saturated colors).

Additional Observations

So, I woke up about 4 minutes before the eclipse. I was very unprepared to photograph it in the normal quality you'd expect from a photographer. However, I did capture some interesting details that I thought I'd share beyond the lack of polarized light.

First up... the shadows.

The shadows were very sharp. In photography there is this concept of light going from a spectrum of hard to soft. Hard light has very high contrast and sharp shadows. Soft light is more flattering and diffused with softer shadows.

To get hard light and sharp shadows you need a small "point" light source. A point light can either be very small or it can be very far away or a combination thereof.

In the studio you could use a bare bulb flash to get a point source.

Or you can attach a modifier like a softbox to create a large light source. The bigger, the softer.

The sun is massive, but it is also super duper far away. So it ends up being the smallest point light source available. However, the atmosphere can scatter and diffuse that light, essentially "enlarging" the light source.

To get perfect hard light shadows you need to go to... the moon.

But the eclipse blocked out about 99% of the sun and it reduced the amount of scattered light. And it greatly reduced the size of the light source causing some very defined sharp shadows.

But not *all* of the shadow was sharp. My left shoulder is very defined but my right shoulder is a bit fuzzy.

You can see it on my fingers too.

Sharp on one side, soft on the other.

This is essentially because the sun has been split into two different light sources in two different directions.

In one direction you have a larger light source causing softer shadows.

And in the other direction you have a smaller light source causing sharper shadows.

In photography we have these strip softboxes that we usually place behind a subject to create an edge light.

Only a narrow, small band of light is hitting the body. If we were to use a strip box to light a face, it would be a small light source creating sharp shadows.

But one trick we can do is to turn the strip light horizontal.

Now the light source hitting the face is large as it wraps around the head.

So a long and narrow light source is essentially large and small simultaneously. And depending on the direction the light is coming from it is either hard or soft light.

Destin from Smarter Every Day explained this phenomenon briefly in his eclipse video.

I also think this large and small light source phenomenon affected my lens flares when I photographed the sun.

In this photo it literally looks like I'm getting starburst flares from two light sources.

And in this photo the flares have a sharp bright edge as well as a dimmer more diffused area.

Normally these starburst flares (caused by light leaking through the metal aperture blades in the lens) have more homogenous tines without that feathering effect.

And then I noticed a different kind of flare in my photos—with all the colors of the rainbow.

And each band of color matched the crescent shape of my partial eclipse.

Like a camera obscura, these flares were in reverse orientation to the crescent sun. And while I wasn't able to get the sun in sharp focus, the purple section of the flare is very defined. I think that represents approximately how much of the sun was covered by the moon at my location—about 130 miles from totality.

I am a student of light. That is essentially what photography is. And I found this to be a fascinating lesson on how bonkers light can be. I was a little bummed I couldn't road trip to southern Missouri to see totality, but I am grateful to still have a cool eclipse experience.

This is honestly better advice than “if at first you don’t succeed, try try again.”

By all means try again. But do that after you figure out WHY you failed!

The more despair I endure in life, the more I love Frodo. I'm just. I'm so glad that Tolkien wrote him like that. He was a hero and it broke him. He was given too much to carry. The circumstances were dire, everyone was doing the best they could, and Frodo tried so hard, for such a good cause, and he...broke. And the narrative has pity for him, the characters show him kindness. Even after victory, his hurts did not heal, and it isn't considered his fault. He must go to the undying lands, to seek out peace there. In universe, he is forgiven for being human - don't be pedantic - and his great torment is recognized. He fell. He could not have done it alone. He is still a hero.

And, I think that's important.

“We set out to save the Shire, and we did… but not for me.”

I assumed this was going to go in the direction of a serious diatribe on abuse, so the reaction image took me OUT

Battle armor

I’m

Honestly this makes perfect sense. The headpiece would be very quite and dark, much like a blinder. It’s probably feeling so safe and secure in that outfit. Emotional support ATAT costume. 

@superlucyjin

Sir, this is my emotional support cosplay

copper my beloved

rose gold, brass, bronze, what cant she do

beautiful base colour, beautiful patina, and it mixes to make beautiful alloys. 10/10 best metal.

she also makes up so much of your wiring, she’s a working gal too.

what CANT she do

Don’t forget about the most beautiful blue made by copper sulfate!!

my absolute FAVOURITE comments on this post are ones like this.

where they just add on something ELSE that copper does. it’s great.

When you need to work in an atmosphere where a stray spark could cause an explosion, you switch out your steel tools for copper alloys since it conducts heat much better and thus won’t spark easy.

So when Tumblr user @mono-red-menace​ hypes up copper, it’s a 60k-note banger, but when I, Ea-nasir,

hey did you know??? that if you stop stretching and maintaining mobility in your body then it goes away?? things get tight and you can't move the way that you used to??? and when you decide to try getting a stretch routine going that the first week fucking sucks because you keep going 'damn i used to be able to do this no problem' and then you have to switch gears and be kind to yourself and just focus on getting better from here instead of berating yourself for dropping the good habits in the first place??? and your body never stops aging so you gotta keep taking care of it and sometimes you gotta take care of it extra in certain areas because of things that happened when you were younger and it's boring and sometimes hurts but it's so necessary???

i am yelling this at myself right now i am going through An Experience (trying to get into a routine of body maintenance again for my physical and mental health)

oh, Sisyphus! i got you

Ok I reblogged this with a long talk in tags recently but this is for all you fuckers in the notes, as a librarian whose library has gone fine-free since the last time I reblogged this post:

TL;DR Fine free is great, it's in line with libraries' mission of public service, and it is doable, but only if governments choose to fund it. If they say they can't, look at where their money is coming from and where it's going.