I’m sorry
WHAT
This is perfect (I found out through someone mentioning tumblr on twitter.com, which I knew meant that shit must be going down.)
Here’s a piece I just finished!💘
I decided to pair this drawing with one of my all-time favourite quotes. I was almost moved to tears the first time I heard it 🦀🦅🐇🐟✍🏻
We are all earthlings 🦊🐷🐰🐥
💌 PRINTS 💌
2006barbie-deactivated20210102
This is lovely
According to Know Your Meme, on August 18th, 2005, Erwin Beekveld brought forth this work into the world. HAPPY TEN YEAR ANNIVERSARY, THEY’RE TAKING THE HOBBITS TO ISENGARD.
sheds a single tear
orangewave
holy shit
middle-earth-aotearoa
HAPPY FIFTEEN YEAR ANNIVERSARY, THEY’RE TAKING THE HOBBITS TO ISENGARD!
this is like scrooge seeing his own grave in a christmas carol
Love reblogging a picture of Tumblr’s grave on Tumblr
capitalism-is-a-disease
“But you always have to watch Tolkien with water. He never uses it unmeaningfully. Pools and lakes mirror stars, and hold hidden things. The Anduin has contrasting banks and, moreover, reeks of history. In a way, it is history, and the Fellowship is going with the current, to break up in confusion at the falls of Rauros. It is worth pointing out that when Aragorn later uses the same river, he comes up it, against the current, changing a course of events that seems inevitable. The other water is of course the Sea. This has been sounding dimly in our ears throughout the book, but in Lothlorien it begins to thunder. Does it suggest loss, departure and death? Certainly. But since water is always life to Tolkien, it must also be eternity.”
— Diana Wynne Jones, ‘The Shape of the Narrative in The Lord of the Rings.’
Wow
“But [Tumblr’s] value, of course, is more than just what it isn’t, and what it points away from. Despite all the drama and discourse lurking in its corners, it’s easy to make your own Tumblr life as simple and as happy as you want it to be. There are no algorithmic threats lurking around every corner, no onslaught of promoted posts from politicians or influencers. More than anything else, Tumblr in 2020 is a self-sustaining ecosystem. It’s a semi-sealed and increasingly fertile terrarium, a nigh-impossible perpetual-motion machine of a platform going productively psychotic in its isolation.”
This article actually really explains why I’m still here after 10 years.
“a nigh-impossible perpetual-motion machine going productively psychotic in its isolation” is my new tindr profile
What a beautiful phrase!
One thing I love about getting into new stories is getting to know the energy of their fandoms. Lord of the Rings is wistful, elegant, tinged with nostalgia. Critical Role is all gifs and angst and incredible art. But I've recently been tempted into The Magnus Archives, and as far as I can tell that fandom? Is one that is entirely composed of feral teens with an eldritch knowledge of TikTok. I am delighted and terrified. Statement ends.
m--ood-deactivated20181217
Glass of Supervicious Fluid
a fine vintage
Take a fucking sip babes
I like how super cruel this fluid is
@mayevenyou comments?
Ah I love that you think of me whenever strange drinks come up! I think this is something Ancalagon the Black might have knocking around his basement bar - that or its what comes out of my cocktail cabinet after two weeks self isolating! Hope everyone is doing OK out there.
MIRUVOR
To the untrained eye, Miruvor may sound a lot like mead. I decided to go a different route with this Miruvor however, since mead is most definitely a beverage that doesn’t appeal to everyone. This drink is perfect for a hot day or a hotter party and you can have more than one glass of it without feeling like a viking. It’s invigorating, refreshing, and just alcoholic enough to be interesting. Of course, if you’d rather pass on that aspect of it the alcohol can be completely left out without affecting the overall flavor of the Miruvor. So whether you’re a party-hardy Tolkienite or just looking for a thirst quencher, this one is for you!
- MJ & K
@mayevenyou peach and lemon tho 🤔
Yeah, maybe on a very, very ripe peach to cut the sweetness, but would need to try this to be sure!
lovelytimes1-deactivated2020021
@mayevenyou there aint no cure for the summertime blues…
See you, middle-earth cowboy...
tolkien + “due to personal reasons…”
bonus:
This is too amazing not to share
Ah, Luthien. What can you say about a woman whose voice releases the bounds of winter, and whose hair is the colour of twilight and hides her from prying eyes? This is a lady whose grandson will, spoiler alert, literally grow up to be a star.
So I’ve kept it very classy this week - a version of the classic champagne cocktail. It should be very cold, very bright, and very bubbly. And just like Luthien, there’s a bit of magic to this cocktail - it gets you drunk ridiculously fast!
LUTHIEN - serves one
Sugar Cube
Bitters
splash vodka - poured from a bottle in the freezer
Chilled, dry champagne, cava, prosecco or other fizzy wine
Drop your sugar cube in a champagne glass, and top with three drops of bitters. Add a splash of vodka to taste, and top with champagne. Drink to all women who go out on quests.
Melethronnen and I felt very fancy - and tipsy - with these. Gifted the ingredients with the recipe tied to it to an istanneth going into the field.
Amazing! I'm so thrilled to see these still going around. Namarie!
You think that if I start a go fund me that says “give me money so I can become the worlds youngest female billionaire and not Kyle Jenner” people would legit give me money?
I made a go fund me so I can become a billionaire before Kylie Jenner please aid me on my journey I love you guys please like and reblog
Scouting the ghost town of Mentryville, an oil drilling town in the Santa Susana Mountains dating to the 1870s, and was impressed by this cute old abandoned cottage…til I learned it’s actually just a left-over set from the 1984 Disney film One Magic Christmas. :)
A different sort of history, definitely! Is it common for sets to be left up like this? I know of Hobbiton in NZ but not much else.
‘And he died with the Dawn in his eyes’
On the eve of war, Tolkien encounters ‘Earendel’
Exeter College, Oxford, 1914.
Note: By the end of 1914, most of Tolkien’s Oxford friends and fellow TCBS members had enlisted. But as an orphan who had always struggled to stay out of poverty, and being by then engaged to his beloved Edith, Tolkien could not afford to abandon his studies, which were crucial to his future chances of an academic career. And so, despite immense pressure from his extended relations and intense societal scorn, he deferred his enlistment until after finishing his final exams the following summer.
“ Back before war broke out, at the end of the university term, Tolkien had borrowed from the college library Grein and Wülcker’s Bibliotek der angelsächsischen Poesie. This massive work was one of those monuments of German scholarship that had shaped the study of Old English, and it meant Tolkien had the core poetic corpus at hand throughout the long summer vacation. He waded through Crist, by the eighth-century Anglo-Saxon poet Cynewulf, but found it ‘a lamentable bore’, as he wrote later: ‘lamentable, because it is a matter for tears that a man (or men) with talent in word-spinning, who must have heard (or read) so much that is now lost, should spend their time composing such uninspired stuff.’ Boredom could have a paradoxical effect on Tolkien: it set his imagination roaming. Furthermore, the thought of stories lost beyond recall always tantalized him. In the midst of Cynewulf’s pious homily, he encountered the words ‘Eala Earendel! engla beorhtast / ofer middangeard monnum sended, ‘Hail Earendel, brightest of angels, above the middle-earth, sent unto men!’ The name Earendel (or Éarendel) struck him in an extraordinary way. Tolkien later expressed his own reaction […]: ‘ I felt a curious thrill, as if something had stirred in me, half wakened from sleep. There was something very remote and strange and beautiful behind those words, if I could grasp it, far beyond ancient English….I don’t think it any irreverence to say that it might derive its curiously moving quality from some older world.’ But whose name was Éarendel? The question sparked a lifelong answer.
Cynewulf’s lines were about an angelic messenger or herald of Christ. The dictionary suggested it meant ray of light, or the illumination of dawn. Tolkien felt that it must be a survival from before Anglo-Saxon, even from before Christianity. (Cognate names such as Aurvandil and Orendil in other ancient records bear this out. According to the rules of comparative philology, they probably descended from a single name before Germanic split into its offspring languages. But the literal and metaphorical meanings of this name are obscure.) Drawing on the dictionary definitions and Cynwulf’s reference to Éarendel as being above our world, Tolkien was inspired with the idea that Éarendel could be none other than the steersman of Venus, the planet that presages the dawn. At Phoenix Farm [his widowed aunt’s residence in Nottinghamshire], on 24 September 1914, he began, with startling éclat:
Éarendel sprang up from the Ocean’s cup In the gloom of the mid-world’s rim; From the door of Night as a ray of light Leapt over the twilight brim, And launching his bark like a silver spark From the golden-fading sand; Down the sunlit breath of Day’s fiery Death He sped from Westerland.
Tolkien embellished ‘The Voyage of Éarendel the Evening Star’ with a favourite phrase from Beowulf, Ofer ýpa ful, ‘over the cup of the ocean’, ‘over the ocean’s goblet’. A further characteristic of Éarendel may have been suggested to Tolkien by the similarity of his name to the Old English ēar ‘sea’: though his element is the sky, he is a mariner. But these were mere beginnings. He sketched out a character and a cosmology in forty-eight lines of verse that are by turn sublime, vivacious, and sombre. All the heavenly bodies are ships that sail daily through the gates at the East and the West. The action is simple: Éarendel launches his vessel from the sunset Westerland at the world’s rim, skitters past the stars sailing their fixed courses, and escapes the hunting Moon, but dies in the light of the rising Sun.
And Éarendel fled from that Shipman dread Beyond the dark earth’s pale. Back under the rim of the Ocean dim, And behind the world set sail; And he heard the mirth of the folk of earth And hearkened to their tears, As the world dropped back in a cloudy wrack On its journey down the years.
Then he glimmering passed to the starless vast As an isléd lamp at sea, And beyond the ken of mortal men Set his lonely errantry, Tracking the Sun in his galleon And voyaging the skies Till his splendor was shorn by the birth of Morn And he died with the Dawn in his eyes.
It is the kind of myth an ancient people might make to explain celestial phenomena. Tolkien gave the title in Old English too (Scipfæreld Earendeles Æfensteorran), as if the whole poem were a translation. He was imagining the story Cynewulf might have heard, as if a rival Anglo-Saxon poet had troubled to record it.
As he wrote, French and German armies clashed fiercely in the town of Albert, in the region named for the River Somme, which flows through it. But Éarendel’s is a solitary species of daring, driven by an unexplained desire. He is not (as in Cynewulf) monnum sended, ‘sent unto men’ as a messenger or herald; nor is he a warrior. If [this early version of] Éarendel embodies heroism at all, it is the maverick, elemental heroism of individuals such as Sir Ernest Shackleton, who that summer had sailed off on his voyage to traverse the Antarctic continent.
If the shadow of war touches Tolkien’s poem at all, it is in a very oblique way. Though he flies from the mundane world, he listens to its weeping, and while his ship speeds off on its own wayward course, the fixed stars take their appointed places on ‘the gathering tide of darkness’. It is impossible to say whether Tolkien meant this to equate in any way with his own situation at the time of writing; but it is interesting that, while he was under intense pressure to fight for King and Country, and while others were burnishing their martial couplets, he eulogized a ‘wandering spirit’ at odds with the majority course, a fugitive in a lonely pursuit of some elusive ideal.
What is this ideal? Disregarding the later development of his story, we know little more about the Éarendel of this poem than we do the stick figure stepping into space in Tolkien’s drawing The End of the World. Still less do we know what Éarendel is thinking, despite his evident daring, eccentricity, and uncontainable curiosity. We might almost conclude that this is truly ‘an endless quest’ not just without conclusion, but without purpose. If Tolkien had wanted to analyze the heart and mind of his mariner, he might have instead turned to the great Old English meditations on exile, The Wanderer and The Seafarer. Instead he turned to Romance, the quest’s native mode, in which motivation is either self-evident (love, ambition, greed) or supernatural. Éarendel’s motivation is both: after all, he is both a man and a celestial object. Supernaturally, this is an astronomy myth explaining planetary motions, but on a human scale it is also a paean to imagination. ‘His heart afire with bright desire’, Éarendel is like Francis Thompson (in Tolkien’s Stapeldon Society paper), filled with ‘a burning enthusiasm for the ethereally fair’. It is tempting to see analogies with Tolkien the writer bursting into creativity. The mariner’s quest is that of the Romantic individual who has ‘too much imagination’, who is not content with the Enlightenment project of examining the known world in ever greater detail. Éarendel overleaps all conventional barriers in a search for self-realization in the face of the natural sublime. In an unspoken religious sense, he seeks to see the face of God. ”
— John Garth, Tolkien and the Great War: The Threshold of Middle-earth
frozen sweet blue tea with lemon, it is bright blue naturally, but lemon makes it purple
“Bisexualitea”
i am so mad i did not think of that
oh, it’s colored with butterfly pea flowers! yeah, those have the same natural dye as red cabbage, which turns blue if your water is really hard. the same dye used in litmus paper. blue = basic, pink = acidic. very fun to play with.
i really want to get some butterfly pea seeds and grow a bunch just for fun :D
@mayevenyou well, i dont know if you’re on the wagon, you’ve been so quiet lately, but if you are…
Hah! I do find myself using this blog less and less, but I always like being called back by an awesome drink! Thanks @hennethgalad, and I hope you and everyone is doing well!
This is what state-sponsored propaganda looks like on Tumblr
Yeah, I got one of Tumblr’s you-may-have-unwittingly-interacted-with-propaganda-blogs emails too. And like everyone else, I kind of shrugged because really, what am I supposed to do about that now? I have search disabled on my blog, and my tags are a mess; there’s no way I could go through and actually find any of the propaganda I may have inadvertently boosted over the seven years I’ve been on this site.
But out of curiosity I looked over Tumblr’s list of IRA-linked blogs. And one username stood out to me. I recognised it because for several months last year it had been showing up constantly in my notifications after I reblogged one of their posts with a response.
That username was black-to-the-bones, and this is the post I reblogged from them:
When I first saw the post by black-to-the-bones, I wanted to know more about these women. I dug up the original Tweet, ran a reverse Google image search and… well, as you can see from my reblog, there turned out to be quite a lot of information about them on the internet, which I spent the next hour or two collating into my post.
Now, don’t get me wrong here: I am one hundred percent aware that history regularly erases the contributions of women, and especially women of colour. But as you can see from my reply, in this particular case the history of these three women absolutely is not “hidden from us”. The person attempting to hide these women’s history was black-to-the-bones themself.
The original post – which we now know was posted by a state-sponsored propaganda blog – took a legitimate issue, but misrepresented facts to stir up emotion about that issue. The issue was perfectly tailored to resonate with Tumblr’s culture of social justice, and it worked. The vast majority of reblogs of the original post do not include any correction or further information.
Again, don’t get me wrong: anger is important. It’s a necessary part of social justice. But we have clear evidence that bad-faith actors are intentionally fomenting false anger to keep us reacting emotionally rather than thinking rationally. And they are smart about it. They will mix in their attempts to divide and enrage us with innocuous cute videos to gain followers, and legitimate posts about issues. So that when they do post actual misinformation, it slips under our radar.
When propaganda blogs do something like try to smear a Jewish woman as a white supremacist, it’s obvious who their target is, and what their goal is. But I wanted to highlight the black-to-the-bones post above because it’s a subtler, more insidious kind of propaganda. It’s part of a continuum of tactics designed to keep up a constant background noise of outrage.
Because while anger is important, constant anger makes it harder for us to empathise with each other. It makes it harder for us to be constructive, rather than destructive. And ultimately, it just exhausts us and leaves us too apathetic to care.
So getting back to my original question: What are we supposed to do about that now?
Fact. Check. Everything.
Your racist grandparents aren’t the only ones being targeted by fake news. We are being targeted with posts that are specifically designed to appeal to Tumblr’s social justice culture. So if you see a post about an issue that makes you angry, stop before you reblog. Check the source. Google the details. Make sure your anger about legitimate issues isn’t being exploited by malicious actors.
Propaganda like this relies on us reacting to outrage before we stop to think. Be smarter than that. Don’t let yourself be manipulated.
This is an excellent post, and I just want to add:
The thing that makes that post reek, in retrospect, of IRA propaganda, isn’t just anger–it’s false futility. That’s where the distortion occurs. It doesn’t say neglected, it doesn’t say ignored, it says hidden–unknowable. Pointless to try and dig up. The Man has already won, might as well stay home on election day rather than contribute to the system. That’s what they’re trying to push. And that’s what crou took pains to debunk. The system might need a lot of good smacks around the face, but it does respond, and the material’s there.
Reblogging this, because I need to remember it too - I also got one of those Tumblr emails. No one is immune to this sort of thing.