OP added a photo of the famous Audrey!

WRONG SUBREDDIT

Ok friends, this has bugged me for awhile now so help me solve it.

In LOTR we're giving two contradicting depictions of Elves and their horses: the Glorfindel approach and the Legolas approach.

In the Glorfindel approach, we're told through various references that he rides Asfaloth with a saddle, stirrups, and reins.

While in the Legolas approach, we're told instead that the "Elvish way with all good beasts" is to ride them with none of these items and direct them solely with the spoken word.

So how do we square these, friends?

Extra points if you give me your unhinged headcanons about this in the replies/tags. I want to hear all about those.

I don't know anything about horses so take this with a grain of salt, but it might be an armor/weight thing where the saddle helps distribute the weight? Like we know Legolas doesn't even wear boots, and then in contrast we have someone like Glorfindel who is probably riding around in half plate half mail 60% of the time. He also wears a lot of gold ornamentation and gold in general adds weight, so his armor is probably pretty heavy for a horse's back.

… do i have an answer to this. i have been doing dressage for [counts on fingers] oh ELEVEN YEARS??????? okay first of all, i’m old. second of all. i should have an answer to this and , yeah alright that’s… close?

off the top of my head, it’s definitely a function thing, and 100% noldorin and sindarin riding styles evolved from completely different functional backgrounds. the fun thing is that it’s!! super probable that the noldor developed a riding habit very similar to what i do!! dressage has its roots in calvary, if i’m not mistaken, or at the very least was the form employed by militaries on horseback.

riding with a saddle – i mean heck, even just riding with stirrups, i have a tendency to drop mine for fun – gives you a lot more inherent balance. you’re doing less work to just hold yourself up and in position; so, if you were, for example, using one or both hands to wield a weapon, so much more of your energy is going towards that and not towards staying in place. which is a thing that makes sense for noldorin riders to care about, given their very direct involvement with the war. having gear designed to make riding easier on soldiers would be very important!!

(also fun fact: different styles of saddle evolved with the necessity of different kinds of movement in mind! modern dressage saddles - and also western saddles, which i’m less familiar with - have deeper seats and longer saddle flaps, as they’re designed for higher contact with the horse and also to lock the rider into place as they ride. if you’re doing dressage right, you the rider are supposed to look completely motionless, all your cueing is just done via muscle contraction and subtle shifts in your weight, more or less!! compare to hunt seat/jumper saddles, with shallow seats and short saddle flaps, which push the rider up off a horse’s back and allow for ease of movement, so that the rider can easily adjust their seat and get their weight up off of the horse in order to safely clear jumps. it’s all very cool!!!)

the sindar are less directly involved with military things, so it makes complete sense for them to focus their horsemanship around more natural methods, which take more time and are less practical for an army but are really a showcase of the extent of what they can do with their discipline, and tbh it’s super cool to consider how elves’ ability to communicate with animals would influence the development of a style more similar to what you’d see irl with natural horsemanship!! which.. since i don’t practice that, i know less about, but it’s a real discipline, and takes a lot of skill.

okay, 1) I love this assessment of the goal and style of different riding styles, but also 2) by this logic, the Noldor would have probably have left Aman with a style much closer to the Sindar!

Like. They would have had no practical cavalry experience. Possibly some theoretical work, but Noldor-as- calvary would be a first age development. (Is there any mention of Tulkas with horses or calvary? All I can think of is Orome, which would put a decided hunting spin on their pre-Beleriand riding style.)

So it's entirely possible that the Noldor have two separate and distinct riding styles: the Calaquendi style for hunting, travel, etc, and the Beleriandic style for warfare.

Also totally possible that both groups normally use stirrups and Legolas is the showoff.

When the narrator says "such was the Elvish way," he's most familiar with the Ithilien colony that is/was right there on his doorstep, and they were founded by Guess Who.

This side by side comparison sure is something

on the one side we have GORGEOUSLY handcrafted armor. Looks like actual plate, the white tree of Gondor clear and easy to see and echoed on the pauldrons and even pressed into his belt! Which is folded in a LOVELY knot to hold it in place. The chainmail is REAL chainmail. And over all there’s some good wear on it, it looks like Boromir has owned and worked and lived in this armor

And on the other side we have stuff that looks like it was created for a shoe string budgeted made-for-TV Camelot production. It’s CLEARLY plastic. And wtf is that LENGTH that leaves a huge swath of his VITAL ORGANS unprotected???? The symbol is PRINTED on it, not even embossed, and so poorly you can’t even really tell what it’s supposed to be. It looks, as far as I can tell, like someone smooshed a bunch of pseudo celtic symbols together. Those shoulder things are NOT pauldrons. They seem to be some half arsed attempt at coin style chainmail? Maybe? I have NO idea what that shirt is. It looks like maybe the designers were going for a type of Gambeson, but it’s just way WAY too thin. It ALL looks like they hit the after halloween sale at party city for supplies.

cc: @petermorwood

This was a show with no grasp of time, no grasp of distance, and no grasp of even fantasy realism - swimming from Valinor back to Middle Earth? Shrugging off a pyroclastic flow? - so I'm not surprised it has no grasp of Hero Props.

"Hero Prop" is the term for Boromir's armour, indeed any armour, costume or accoutrements worn by a Principal Character in LOTR or any other movie.

"Hero" has nothing to do with the character's alignment, applying to Sauron and the Witch-King as well. It means any costume, weapon etc. made as detailed as possible because the character wearing it will be front and centre in very close shots, where an IMAX screen might make any flaws a metre high.

(Bernard Hill was amazed by the details in Théoden's armour, some of which only he and his dresser ever saw. More here.)

Now there's the Numenorean bargain-basement rig up there, and the full plate of the Action Heroine here.

I don't know what it's made of, but it looks like vac-formed, spray-painted plastic.

Compare it to an example of Elven armour from The Hobbit movies, which notoriously didn't have anything like the development time of LOTR...

No further comment.

Conclusion: Numenor at its height had mass production. Problem replaced with different problems solved.

This is a memo from within the office of a Florida prosecutor.

I always get a kind of… reality shock, you could say, from things like this. Because most of the discussion of racism I see is about stuff like a fan artist drawing a dark-skinned character with not-dark-enough skin. 

And then I take a look at the real world and I see people entrusted by society with the power to destroy lives, blatantly using that power to punish anyone who dares to be born the wrong ethnicity.

"Oh my god, they wrote down the racism policy" --Someone who became a prosecutor on purpose

I can in fact believe that her normal county is less bad, but also that doesn't sound like someone who's surprised by the existence of a racism policy.

*his heart temporarily stopped, he required resuscitation, etc

I’m making a follow up to my post about this but I was curious of people’s thoughts!

I tend to go back and forth between a few different interpretations depending on my mood!

It's not even a metaphor; it's not about what happened to him at all, in context it means "he was Terrifying and Eldritch and Whatnot."

Whether this means all reincarnated Elves can do the Glorfindel thing (and people like Maedhros/Galadriel/etc can imitate them) is I guess up for debate?

Salvete, Gaius Iuli'us Caesar sum et pilorum album quam nivem habeo et aureos, sed interdum virides lauros et imperium Romanum construxi et eius eram quasi primus Caesar (sic merui nomen meum) et multi indicant mihi me Marcus Crassus similem esse (si non scitis Marcus Crassus, vobis opus est pecunia). Brutus non est filius meus quod est bonum nam ET TU, MI FILI???!?. Iamia sum sed dentes albos et rectos habeo. Pallidam cutem habeo. Etiam, maga sum magicum ludum, nomine Pigverruca, visitans quod desinam (ego sum MMCXIV), veni, vidi, vici. Classicus sum (si vos id non suspexistis) et multas togas emptas in Basilica Iulia habeo. Ratio amo et bellum Gallicum gero. Veluti, hodie omnia Gallia occupata. Omnia Gallia? Certe! Non est vicus parvus inter Aquarium, Babaorum, Laudanum et Brevisbonum. Ambulabam foris Pigverruca. Ninxit et pluvit et Gallia divisa erat in partes tres, quod me fecit felix. Marcus Porcius Cato me observavit. Digitum medium illo monstravi.

#I hate that I know what this is

(via @publicdomainbooksdevotee )

My Latin is pretty rusty, but I know enough to say that it’s a bunch funnier, so let me take a stab at translating. I’m breaking down the original so if I make any ridiculous mistakes through not having taken Latin in 15+ years, other people can correct me.

“Salvete, Gaius Iuli'us Caesar sum” – Greetings, all! I am Gaius Julius Caesar

“et pilorum album quam nivem habeo et aureos,” – and I have spears that are whiter than snow and golden

“sed interdum virides lauros” – but sometimes green laurels

“et imperium Romanum construxi” – and I built the Roman empire

“et eius eram quasi primus Caesar (sic merui nomen meum)” – and I was, like, its first Caesar (that’s how I got my name) [note: a more literal translation is “thus I earned my name”, but it’s obvious that this is a direct reference to the line “that’s how I got my name” in the original]

“et multi indicant mihi me Marcus Crassus similem esse (si non scitis Marcus Crassus, vobis opus est pecunia).” – and many people say to me that I seem to be like Marcus Crassus (if you don’t know Marcus Crassus, your work is money). [translator’s note: “your work is money” is not a phrase I’m familiar with. Google Translate suggests “you need money” as a more idiomatic translation. My best guess is it might mean something like “you work for your money instead of being a patrician with a family inheritance”.]

“Brutus non est filius meus quod est bonum nam ET TU, MI FILI???!?.” – Brutus is not my son, which is good because AND YOU, MY SON???!? [note: this is the more classically attested version of Caesar’s last words, famously quoted in English as “et tu, Brute?” or “and you [are killing me too], Brutus?”

“Iamia sum sed dentes albos et rectos habeo.” – I am a [vampire?] but I have white and straight teeth. [note: I’m more familiar with the Lamia as a Greek female monster similar to Scylla but with only one neck. However, Google Translate’s suggestion of “vampire” seems likely accurate from the obvious context.]

“Pallidam cutem habeo.” – I have pale skin.

“Etiam, maga sum magicum ludum, nomine Pigverruca, visitans quod desinam (ego sum MMCXIV), veni, vidi, vici.” – Also, I am a female witch [at?] a magic school, named Hogwarts, which I will stop visiting (I am 2094), I came, I saw, I conquered.“ [note: “Veni, vidi, vici” is famously what Caesar said when deciding to bring his army to Rome and become its ruler.]

“Classicus sum (si vos id non suspexistis) et multas togas emptas in Basilica Iulia habeo.” – I am classical (if you didn’t know) and I have bought many togas in the Julian Basilica.

“Ratio amo et bellum Gallicum gero.” – I love reason and I conduct the Gallic [French] wars.

“Veluti, hodie omnia Gallia occupata. Omnia Gallia? Certe!” – As if, today all Gaul is occupied. All Gaul? Definitely!

“Non est vicus parvus inter Aquarium, Babaorum, Laudanum et Brevisbonum.” – It is not a small village between Aquarium [pun: fish tank], Babaorum [pun: rum cake], Laudanum [pun: opium product] and Short Good.

“Ambulabam foris Pigverruca.” – I was walking outside Hogwarts.

“Ninxit et pluvit et Gallia divisa erat in partes tres, quod me fecit felix.” – It snowed and rained and Gaul was divided into three parts, which made me happy. [note: Caesar’s history of the Gallic Wars famously begins “Gaul is divided into three parts”.]

“Marcus Porcius Cato me observavit. Digitum medium illo monstravi.” – Marcus Porcius Cato [the Younger, a famous opponent of Caesar’s ambitions] stared at me. I put my middle finger up at him.“

Additional context:

(introductory spiel to every volume of Astérix)

Once again considering the au where Miriel darts out of Mandos the instant Finwe bites it, and appears unheralded in Tirion like Eru swung a metaphorical two-by-four at the back of Feanor's head right before he's about to proclaim the Oath.

Also her first words back in the world of the living are “my turn to marry Indis.”

growing up with a psychologist for a mother was so funny because my sister and i would be like “mo-om why do we have to go to bed now” and she would respond with a long explanation of the research on the effects of sleep on the brain and body followed by another explanation on permissive vs. authoritarian vs. authoritative parenting styles, with citations

this was actually really good in some instances though because i started having insomnia and intrusive thoughts very young and when little me was like “mom i don’t like the thoughts in my head but i can’t make them go away and i can’t sleep” she replied with “oh honey. active thought suppression never works. in fact, wegner et al. (1987) tested this when they told a bunch of people to talk about whatever they wanted, and they told half of them to try not to think about a white bear. people thought more about the white bear when they were trying not to think about it! but when they told the people to think about a red car whenever thoughts of the white bear came to mind, the people had a much easier time not thinking about the white bear. so you see, you can’t force the thoughts out of your mind. you just have to let them pass through, and pick something else that you want to focus on”

and so ever since i was a very little kid i knew how to deal with intrusive thoughts, I’ve had them my whole life but never developed ocd or senses of shame about them cause my mom did her phd on thought suppression and she knows what’s up

OH you mean "growing up with a psychologist for a mother" like your REGULAR mother was a psychologist, i thought this was going to be a really out-there experiment.

Timepiece with the fewest moving parts:

Sundial.

Timepiece with the most moving parts:

Hourglass.

#sundial has some noteworthy moving parts#like the sun#and the earth

For sundial purposes we only care about how they move relative to each other. We can treat the sun as fixed (or the earth, if you're into that), so we don't need to edit the quote at all.

Two-syllable compound verbs starting with "g" that didn't make the cut:

"Gainsay, ghostwrite, gunfight" has a really good rhythm to it, though.

I need someone to show me the character this could reasonably describe.

Verona from pale? Gunfight’s a bit of a stretch though.

Lucy! I think she and Verona both did the ghostwriting from two or three archvillains ago, when they fought that invasion with paperwork. But really, ghostwriting is perfectly on-theme for a combat lawyer.

this image of Mongolia's best known paleontologist standing in between the fossilized arms of Deinocherius is undeniably the most powerful image in paleontological history

"best known paleontologist" so far. You never know when Deinocherius might find an even better one.

Ah yeah this is a thing where the government funds itself by borrowing money, like any company does or like you might do yourself to buy a car or repair a house. But the US government has passed a law that says it can't owe more than $X, where X is some large number. This is the "debt ceiling". Because inflation and so on, over time $X becomes less money compared to what the government needs to operate. So it runs into a problem where the Treasury hasn't collected enough taxes to pay salaries and so on and can't borrow money to do it, because the government is already $X in debt. This leads to a government shutdown (something that doesn't happen in civilised countries.)

The solution is magic! The government has, according to the constitution and law passed by congress, the right to mint dollar coins. If they are made of any other metal than platinum they have to be $50, $25, $10, $5 or $1 coins. But platinum coins can have any value. For example, $1,000,000,000,000. So the Mint makes such a coin. The Secretary of the Treasury takes it to the Federal Reserve, which is a bank, and says Hello, I'd like to deposit some cash on behalf of the Department of the Treasury into its account. The teller says, are you bullshitting me, that's not money, that's not worth $1,000,000,000,000. The Secretary pulls out the text of the law and says, It's money and it's worth $1 trillion because the government says it's money and worth $1 trillion. The teller grouchingly adds $1 trillion to the Treasury's account.

Basically it's the most bullshit way to almost literally just print more money to pay the bills. If you do it, it's counterfeiting, if the government does it that's what money is because the government decides what money is. So why haven't they done this? Because it's so bullshit and clearly bullshit people might go, uh, this whole government is bullshit, we want another one.

This is unacceptable, unless they give Matthew Perry a pompadour, a checkered suit, and make him say some bullshit like "ring-a-ding-ding baby!" as he pulls out the stupid Platinum Coin of Arbitrary Value at the federal reserve, in which case it's completely acceptable and pretty funny, actually

Minting The Coin is an economically good idea if and only if it's the size of a table and stamped with a Looney Tunes logo.

Also it should be legal to steal it.

Ah yeah this is a thing where the government funds itself by borrowing money, like any company does or like you might do yourself to buy a car or repair a house. But the US government has passed a law that says it can't owe more than $X, where X is some large number. This is the "debt ceiling". Because inflation and so on, over time $X becomes less money compared to what the government needs to operate. So it runs into a problem where the Treasury hasn't collected enough taxes to pay salaries and so on and can't borrow money to do it, because the government is already $X in debt. This leads to a government shutdown (something that doesn't happen in civilised countries.)

The solution is magic! The government has, according to the constitution and law passed by congress, the right to mint dollar coins. If they are made of any other metal than platinum they have to be $50, $25, $10, $5 or $1 coins. But platinum coins can have any value. For example, $1,000,000,000,000. So the Mint makes such a coin. The Secretary of the Treasury takes it to the Federal Reserve, which is a bank, and says Hello, I'd like to deposit some cash on behalf of the Department of the Treasury into its account. The teller says, are you bullshitting me, that's not money, that's not worth $1,000,000,000,000. The Secretary pulls out the text of the law and says, It's money and it's worth $1 trillion because the government says it's money and worth $1 trillion. The teller grouchingly adds $1 trillion to the Treasury's account.

Basically it's the most bullshit way to almost literally just print more money to pay the bills. If you do it, it's counterfeiting, if the government does it that's what money is because the government decides what money is. So why haven't they done this? Because it's so bullshit and clearly bullshit people might go, uh, this whole government is bullshit, we want another one.

This is unacceptable, unless they give Matthew Perry a pompadour, a checkered suit, and make him say some bullshit like "ring-a-ding-ding baby!" as he pulls out the stupid Platinum Coin of Arbitrary Value at the federal reserve, in which case it's completely acceptable and pretty funny, actually

Minting The Coin is an economically good idea if and only if it's the size of a table and stamped with a Looney Tunes logo.

category 14 autism event 23 dead 1400 wounded at last count but that number continues to rise as reports come in

dear diary bit my mother’s arm today because I’m so angy about Peter ‘the only thing I took away from Minas Tirith’s description is that it’s a semi-circle and it’s tiered’ Jackson but also because Tolkien is no better with his dumbass ‘so that those in the Citadel might, like mariners in a mountainous ship, look from its peak sheer down upon the Gate seven hundred feet below’ couples with his fucking ‘Then Pippin cried aloud, for the Tower of Ecthelion, standing high within the topmost walls, shone out against the sky, glimmering like a spike of pearl and silver, tall and fair and shapely‘ THIS is why we have to force literature students to do maths how am I supposed to live laugh love under these conditions

Surely the obvious answer is that the army isn't all from the City?

Gondor is a feudal state, and (unlike in the movies, with its "where are Gondor's armies" line) they've been preparing for this for a while. They might have thousands from Dol Amroth, hundreds from Pelargir, and who knows how many from miscellaneous. Sending at least a few people for this fight is, like, the one job of every noble in Gondor.

So they do have to fit the army itself in the city, plus probably a lot more civilians than usual, but the population to support that many soldiers is spread around the whole country.

something I'm unclear about: when people invoke the sixth amendment in an interrogation room ("I want to exercise my right to speak to an attorney") do they have to have a particular attorney on retainer or whatever in advance? If they don't have one but they don't want a public defender are they allowed to like look a lawyer up online in the moment and give them a call? Is that your "one call"? how the fuck does one without a lawyer obtain private legal representation in the moment

As others have said, you don't need to have (and probably don't have) a specific "my lawyer."

The real point of saying "I don't want to answer questions until I speak with my attorney" is that then, your right to shut up is protected under the Sixth Amendment instead of just the Fifth.

(General reminder that you almost always do in fact want to shut up even if you think you're innocent. For lots of reasons mostly unrelated to this post.)

Anyway. Due to Supreme Court Bullshit, the right to remain silent barely counts for anything these days. I haven't looked up cases lately, but the current bunch is explicitly hostile to Miranda rights and goes out of their way to limit it. Lower court judges are worse and you should not count on them excluding anything regardless of how clear-cut the rights violation was.

Basically--if I'm remembering right--the 5A right to remain silent does not protect you until you say out loud "I am invoking my right to remain silent." Even then, if they "stop" questioning you but then ask something "later" and you answer them, then courts will shrug and say they guess you changed your mind.

If you say you're invoking your right to a lawyer, they actually do have to stop until you've talked to a lawyer.

So it's not really about the lawyer. It's a set of magic words that casts the spell "quit questioning me, but for real this time."

Also, be explicit about using your rights. If it doesn't work at first, use the most official words you know. Throw in a "hereby" or an "invoke" for no reason. Highfalute. Saying "give me a lawyer, dawg" doesn't cut it and I wish I were joking.

Whoa

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/mar/10/virginia-judge-uses-19th-century-slavery-law-frozen-embryos-property this article about it is really confusing, but if i’m understanding it correctly, the man and woman are divorced and arguing over a pair of frozen embryos. the wife wants to use them, the husband does not.

“Honeyhline Heidemann, 45, wants to use the embryos. Jason Heidemann objects.

Initially, Gardiner sided with Jason Heidemann. The law at the heart of the case governs how to divide “goods and chattels”.

The judge ruled that because embryos could not be bought or sold, they couldn’t be considered as such and therefore Honeyhline Heidemann had no recourse under that law to claim custody of them.

But after the ex-wife’s lawyer, Adam Kronfeld, asked the judge to reconsider, Gardiner found that before the civil war, it also applied to enslaved people and said he found parallels that forced him to reconsider whether the law should apply to embryos.

In a separate part of his opinion, Gardiner also said he erred when he initially concluded that human embryos cannot be sold.

“As there is no prohibition on the sale of human embryos, they may be valued and sold, and thus may be considered ‘goods or chattels’,” he wrote.”

im having a hard time understanding what the hell this actually means but i think(?) the judge initially ruled in favor of the husband, and did not classify embryos as chattel, but then amended his decision in favor of the wife to classify them as chattel.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/16/us/virginia-slave-laws-embryos.html this article is a lot more readable and confirms that the chattel ruling was in favor of the wife.

i think that tweet is a weird way to frame this case. i don’t know if it’s a productive way to discuss the horrifying decision by the judge, it just made things more confusing + you can’t even read the wapo article she linked in the og thread bc its behind a paywall. twitter is where accurate information goes to die

indeed it looks like the tweet almost exactly inverts what is actually going on here

The article is written confusingly, but at least it did link the opinion. And the court did a pretty good job of explaining this one!

(Not to be confused with a good job of deciding this one.)

So that's why we're in court at all. And both sides have normal human motivations for being there, no evil so far.

And now we get into the judge's reasoning. This is the part that mentions slavery, so you'll want to pay attention to what it says and does not say.

(The ex-husband did also argue that letting his ex-wife use their embryos without his consent violates his right not to procreate. Judge said that was "premature," which I would hope means it depends on facts that haven't come out at the motion to dismiss stage and will be ruled on later. But I dunno, the judge didn't say exactly what the ex-husband should have been waiting for.)

The slavery reference is mostly irrelevant to what we care about here--it was about what kind of property this is, not whether it is property at all. If you think ownership is the wrong lens, fair enough. (see also: pets.) "Blame the legislature" is a standard excuse judges use, but in this case it's probably true. As far as I know this would come out the same under other states' laws, and probably every other England-derived legal system unless they added a specific rule.

Abolish the comic book industrial complex 🙂

yeah him too.