Nern ed i Nor-Nuiannen

This tag made my day, dear. Thank you so much! Those were good days. I still remember that you posted on Tuesdays and Fridays, and I could pretty much predict the time down to the half-hour. It would often land right before a checkin every Friday afternoon for my internship. Let me tell you, when the chapter didn’t land before then, it was the longest meeting ever lol.

I don’t have as much time as I used to while I was in school, but those were very good days indeed. I still follow your series and enjoy every single update ❤️

"Young she was and yet not so. The braids of her dark hair were touched by no frost; her white arms and clear face were flawless and smooth, and the light of stars was in her bright eyes, grey as a cloudless night; yet queenly she looked, and thought and knowledge were in her glance, as of one that has known many things that the years bring. Above her brow her head was covered with a cap of silver lace netted with small gems, glittering white; but her soft grey raiment had no ornament save a girdle of leaves wrought in silver."

Grim says "NO! we are NOT silly."

it might seem mean, but Grim is actually providing a great service! she does like Belphie (begrudgingly) and understands that he is a tiny baby who just wants to play, but is also teaching him that jumping on adult cats and playing with their tails is not allowed.

and she's doing it all by smacking him without claws, meaning he doesn't get hurt from these lessons.

Why am I beset by tiny infants…

I have a lot of feelings on how indigenous groups who didn’t build permanent structures like cities aren’t seen as being as sophisticated as ones who built large cities, without accounting for the fact that maybe it’s in our values systems to leave as light of a footprint as possible and it’s important that our structures are easily taken down or fade with the passage of time because it’s easier on the landscape, but ya know.

This made me think of the story one of my Coast Salish acquaintances tells of how her family would travel from the Puget Sound up Mt. Rainier every year and, sure, following herds but also they had berry bushes and trees and prairies (with camas is the one she always talks about but I'm sure other foods) that were in the care of specific families so they also followed the plants through the year. They cultivated and cared for them, not just coming to gather and move on to the unknown. They came back and to the same places, the same plants and trees every year.

I think a lot of people mistake what a huge connection that is to land and territory. They hear "nomadic" and dismiss it without realizing. It doesnt mean you dont have roots in the area. It means your roots are so ingrained in the area outsiders dont even see them there.

Yeah!

I’d like to recommend a podcast called Tides of History by Patrick Wyman. His latest unit starts all the way in ancient pre-history and is currently going through the Bronze and Iron Ages. I can’t remember the exact episodes, but he does some excellent unpacking of why agriculture is neither a binary nor a marker of cultural complexity.

Sure, we think that a sedentary family unit farming fields of grain and vegetables are farmers, not hunter-gatherers. But how about a nomadic group clearing ground for their favorite wild plants to grow better? How about a group with an seasonal circuit where they plant in the spring and circle back to harvest in the fall? How about a sedentary group that keeps a garden plot at home but still gets 80% of their calories from gathered and hunted resources?

It’s terribly reductive to say you must be stationary to farm, or nomadic to hunt. And it’s terribly insulting to argue that you must be stationary and hierarchical to develop more complex societies and innovations.

This is how you do a meme. I don’t want to tell anyone my name or my bra size or my date of birth on the internet. Why can’t we make memes using useless and non-personal data points?

Connecticut superhell. Sound about right

math people scare me. math people will be like "math works in mysterious ways TO YOU. i get it though." and they do and it's fucking terrifying.

and if you ask them to elaborate they will but then you'll wish they didn't

The great conundrum of math.

I’m torn because unfortunately I love baffling people with my weird math tangents. There is a certain pride, a smug satisfaction, in laying all you know out there and knowing that it will confuse but impress people. In the great abyss of math aversion, I am one of the winners.

On the other hand, I believe that math has an unfair reputation. The kind of math that’s taught in school has a payoff that comes approximately a year into some math-heavy college or equivalent field. High school asks kids for the learning investment when few of them will see the benefits. But I can still remember the day in Calc III when I really got why time is the fourth dimension. It made every single day of algebra and geometry up till that point worth it.

Imagine the moving object is a 3-dimensional ball, yeah? Length, width, height. That’s three of four. But the dynamic a = [a number] slider is the adjustable fourth dimension that describes how the ball moves about the graph, almost like how a marble could move through a series of tracks. (It may be easier to imagine how you can “adjust” one of the first three dimensions. You can picture a motionless cube in your head, yes? Now adjust the height - up like a skyscraper, down like a flat book. Time is no different, and any of the four dimensions can be expressed mathematically.)

What sucks, though, is that my brief explanation and gif can’t stand in for years of education-built understanding. What sucks, though, is that I can’t help you understand how sucking it up to learn multivariate integrals and derivatives help you appreciate this. What sucks most is that I know the phrase “multivariate integrals and derivatives” just lost a lot of you, even though it’s the correct and appropriate phrase to use here.

I don’t know what the solution, or really even the big point, here is. I love math. I wish it were easier for everyone to love it too. But to love it in the way I do, you need to have the same kind of experiences with it that I did. Many people won’t, or can’t, or shouldn’t—just the same way I should never become a doctor. But it feels different with math somehow, and it seems like a shame.

not only are these pics real, the second one in particular was taken within 10 minutes of my childhood home and is an area ive driven through >1000 times

There is an area south of Richmond, VA, that I for some reason only end up having to travel through at night, and it always feels like a collaboration between Escher and Giger.

Yeah no, that’s what Texas roads look like. I’m from Colorado, and every time we got to an interstate exchange we looked at the map and were like “OMG we’re never gonna get through this” but the thing is they … kinda … work?

Like in St Louis we took wrong turns and ended up on the wrong roads. But in Dallas we just went where the signs said to go and we always ended up in the right place which frankly was more confusing than the road maps because how?? The hell?? Can that happen? Every time???

But it does. Those intersections work. I just don’t know how they work. Because they are beyond comprehension.

Tolkien Tolkien Tolkien Tolkien i'm begging of you please don't kill my man

His beauty is beyond compare His stature tall, and long his hair Like every other man you wrote has been I know the more you speak his praise The fewer his remaining days How easily you break my heart, Tolkien

I think this song is made of lies Your fave's your fave because he dies Or 'cause his pain gets worse in every scene. If what it took to make us care Was fairness, wisdom and great hair We'd all be on here stanning Finarfin.

What slander found within these notes! I stan Finarfin, love him totes But in the text he largely stays unseen He lost his sons, his daughter banned He suffered plenty at Jirt's hand Death isn't the worst fate cast by Tolkien But Elrond and Finarfin show What we all here already know The chance of getting out alive is lean How many more were slain and lost Their tales compel, but there's a cost My love is true, it belongs to Tolkien Tolkien, Tolkien, Tolkien, Tolkien i'm begging of you please don't kill my man Tolkien, Tolkien, Tolkien, Tolkien An Andreth, Turin, Finrod, Beleg fan

It seems to me we disagree

About a simple thing, to me:

Selection bias, to the fancy folk

The book that the Professor wrote

Has too much death, and we must note

A fave is just more likely to have croaked!

And since your fave is stone-cold dead,

What makes them stick inside your head?

Bit a werewolf, stole a gem, swore Oaths?

So, is it life or is it death

That makes you stop and catch your breath,

Or let’s ask this: why cannot it be both?

Tolkien, Tolkien, Tolkien, Tolkien

You wrote a book that broke our fucking hearts

Tolkien, Tolkien, Tolkien, Tolkien

It’s got pain in every single part!

Hey, I'm doing a project for a statistics class, could you please help me by filling out this survey:

Statistics Questions (google.com)

hey fuck it, why not, stats are really cool

America is absolutely disconnected to meat

I think I realized this when I had went to see my dad and stepmom one day and asked if I could place my hawk’s food. (A rabbit leg) in the freezer. My step mom was disgusted by the idea that a leg from an animal was in the freezer meanwhile an entire chicken was sitting in the fridge.

Your rotisserie chicken is an entire chicken.

Your pork chop is a hunk of pig.

Your rack of ribs are from a cow’s rib cage.

It’s like Americans view meat as colorful red and pink hued shapes that just exist and come into the world packaged.

You see so many people getting harassed or even having their content flagged for showing how to process or field dress meat when it’s at it’s freshest. Right after culling. For some reason this is considered “gore” by many folks when in reality it’s no more different from plucking a processed chicken after cull.

You also notice that Americans have an idea of what’s normal meat and what isn’t normal meat and there’s racist undertones that I’ve noticed in a lot of these comments left on foreign cooking videos

You have people that claim a video of a man in a different country preparing something like this is “eating a dog.” Meanwhile this is roasted goat.

You have people who’s only perception of an edible fish is in fillet or fish stick form and they call something like this nasty because “Eww there’s a head!” Yeah.. most animals have heads..

Some of ya’ll need to realize what your meat looks like prior to processing and that it’s prepared in different ways. We also need to erase the stigma behind non traditional meats.

Truly, genuinely, as an indigenous person I talk about this exact thing a LOT! Like, don't get me wrong I get a bit squicked when dressing a chicken or gutting and cleaning a fish, lord knows I had really mixed feelings the first time I saw a deers throat slit (I thought it was cruel, until my elder asked me if I would have preferred to let it suffer instead) The truth of the matter is that animals and humans are intertwined. We are food to one another, that's the way of the world and I think people forget that when we champion for humane treatment of animals and when we rail against factory farming we need to remember that removing death is not the goal, removing undue suffering it.

I think there's no better fandom to be a nerd in than the Tolkien fandom. Mostly thanks to the professor himself. People I know be like "You're learning a language just because of a book?! Girl, you're so obsessed!"

Well, at least I'm just learning a language, not inventing one! And at least it's just one language, not ten! You think my hour long rants are annoying? You can be glad my current obsession-level is maybe 5% of Tolkien's, or we'd be having an entirely different conversation right now.

Really, Tolkien was the worst of all of us, and no one can tell me otherwise. You can also see in the way he wrote his characters that he was just fangirling the entire time. I literally see him waking his wife in the middle of the night, like "I can't sleep, I just keep thinking about Fingon, he's so cool and epic and tragic and aahhhhhh!". I also think nothing makes a better story than the author being just as much in love with the characters as the fans are.

I feel like haughty feanorians is a pretty common characterization, but if fingon was that close of a friend of maedhros I think he would have to be equally haughty. Pretentious pretty boy eldest sons that talk shit behind people's back

no more sweetie pie fingon; they're both punchable pre-darkening

Maedhros and Fingon always remind me of something someone said about House and Wilson when House was a hot fandom: Wilson only vomes across as a nice guy because he spends so much time standing next to House.

In real life you donot really get asshole&cinnamon roll friendships, just extreme asshole & chiller assole. Fingon's the asshole who plays nice(er), and he's still a jerk and a killer. 💚

like

Fingon was very much a Kinslayer

he might have thought his cousins had been unfairly attacked at Losgar and rushed to defend them, but he was very much down with killing Teleri to do it - he thought that inventing a wholly unknown crime was a valid response

and this is not mutually exclusive with the famous Silm passage that describes him as just and fair and the most renowned son of Finwë, hating only Morgoth - I know kind and righteous people who are still absolutely insufferable assholes, if only because they are completely, to a fault, self-assured

give me a Fingon who walks all over people with the force of his convictions, who is just right often enough that he doesn’t accept input, who is so accustomed to leadership and authority that he can’t see from any perspective but the top

give me a Fingon who is a good person, but a deeply obnoxious ass