Games, changes, and fears

I finished reading The Priory Of The Orange Tree by Samantha Shannon, and I wanted to do a study of Eadaz du Zāla uq-Nāra.

I don’t think any movie will make me feel the same ethereal sense of otherworldly sorrow and disembodied awe as that scene in Lord of the Rings where the loyal son is sent off into a doomed battle to please his vindictive father while Pippin sings a mourning song of his people

I was like 12 and high off this shit

These movies CHANGED ME

This is one of my favourite parts of the whole trilogy. It’s haunting.

And that Pippin takes actually a happy walking song of his people, because Hobbit songs are generally happy and about food and drink and gifts and things, and *transforms* it into a mourning song.

The song is from Fellowship, before all the heavy plot hits and they’re still in the Shire. It’s about walking, and how eventually all the bad things that scare or sadden you will fade away and you’ll be home warm by the fire.

And Pippin takes it, changes the lines, the key, and sings a song that is truly fit for Denethor’s great hall.

Knowing Billy Boyd gave his own melody to it and everyone had chills after hearing him sing it. This is how you get actors involved with the story and character, this is how amazingly well these films were cast. Fans have been singing that haunting tune in echoing halls and caves and towers for 20 years now and it never loses its beauty.

And even better: Billy Boyd composed the tune to the song and then performed it for Peter Jackson and everyone else while filming. They only did one take! That very first take is the one that’s used in the film! He’s just that good!!

whenever i see another tiktok girlie talking about how she wishes to have been a fangirl in 2010s i feel like a seasoned veteran overhearing a foolish youngin boasting about wanting to go to war for glory and adventure. you naive little idiot. you know nothing. you understand nothing. you weren't there in the trenches. i have seen things, terrible things. i cannot plug in my phone charger at night without being plagued by the visions of Him

please watch this i gasped

This performance is an homage to the legendary and stunning Tandi Iman Dupree and y'all should definitely watch her iconic performance if you haven’t seen it before

Extremely satisfying watch…I wonder why he burns the ends he puts in the ground??

Prevents rot and keeps the beetles from burrowing

I love watching stuff like this

I love how he makes it all fancy and nice. What a lovely little cabin.

any room can be a panic room if you just give me a fucking second

Holy shit

hey netizens! i'm not sure how many people are aware, but youtube's been slowly rolling out a new anti-adblock policy that can't be bypassed with the usual software like uBlock Origin and Pi-Hole out of the gate

BUT, if you're a uBlock Origin user (or use an adblocker with a similar cosmetics modifier), you can add these commands in the uBlock dashboard to get rid of it!

reblog to help keep the internet less annoying and to tell corporations that try shit like this to go fuck themselves <3

Where do I copy-paste these to? "My filters"? "My Rules"?

'my filters'! if you look closely you'll notice the format is different between the two pages. the (website)(##)(additional text) format goes in filters

!!!!!!!

Adorable! ❤

i hope this doesn’t need to be said but just in case

you might have seen people talking about sudowrite and/or their tool storyengine recently

and just like… don’t. don’t do it. don’t try it out just to see what it’s about.

for two main reasons:

1) never feed anything proprietary into a large language model (LLM, eg ChatGPT, google bard, etc.).

this means don’t give it private company information when you’re at work, but also don’t give it your original writing. that’s your work.

because of the way these language models work, anything you feed into it is part of it now. and yeah, the FAQ says they “don’t claim ownership” over anything and yeah, they give you that reassuring bullshit about how unlikely it is that the exact same sentence will be reconstructed—

but that’s not the point.

do you have an unusual way of constructing sentences? a metaphor you like to use? a writing tic that sets you apart from the rest? anything that gives you a unique writing voice?

feed your writing into an LLM, and the model has your voice now. the model can generate text that sounds like it was written by you and someone else can claim it’s theirs because they gave the model a prompt.

don’t feed the model.

2) the other reason is that sudowrite scraped a bunch of omegaverse fic without consent to build their model and that’s a really shitty thing to do, because it means people weren’t given the chance to choose whether or not to feed the model.

don’t feed the model.

also this.

don’t feed the model.

This seems entirely too believable.

I don’t want this tech anywhere near me or my work. I’ve long since locked down my fic at AO3 to members-only (though shutting that barn door may have happened too late). And more recently I’ve been sneakily offered “AI ‘help’” by Adobe Photoshop and Microsoft (Word) 365.

No, no, no, NO.

Just… no. As we say over here…

Calista Flockhart and Melissa Benoist as Cat Grant and Kara Danvers in Supergirl

DEREK MORGAN & ELLE GREENAWAY