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Forever Faithful, Forever Fearless

@moonsbloodinmyveins

Angelina, Virgo, Happily Drowning in Hockey/Supernatural &...... *hand-waves*

“And it is not far enough!”

“Do you think there’s a corner of this Earth that you could travel to far away enough free me from this torment?”

“[…] that honor is hanging by a thread that grows more precarious with every moment I spend in your presence”

“You are the bane of my existence”

“And the object of my desires”

I know that Peter’s Jackson Lord of the Rings trilogy technically has flaws but also….it doesn’t. It’s perfect.

Are these magic cloaks?’ asked Pippin, looking at them. with wonder.

‘I do not know what you mean by that,’ answered the leader of the Elves. ‘They are fair garments, and the web is good, for it was made in this land. They are Elvish robes certainly, if that is what you mean. Leaf and branch, water and stone: they have the hue and beauty of all these things under the twilight of Lorien that we love; for we put the thought of all that we love into all that we make.”

- Fellowship of the Ring, Chapter 8: Farewell to Lorien

This is how I think of Jackson’s movies. Yes, there are serious flaws - Gandalf’s de-powering, Gimli as comic relief, and Faramir, namely - but come on.

Remember when the guys making their chain mail invented a new method for quickly producing large amounts of it by hand? Remember Miranda Otto walking down the street, practicing sword positions? The guys who forged all of the swords - for leads and for extras? The men and women riders who volunteered to be riders of Rohan? The costume designers who designed the inside of Theoden’s armor (which no one would ever see) so beautifully that Bernard Hill said he felt like a king? The friendships between the cast, and their size doubles, and the stuntmen?

When they made that movie, they put all that they loved into all that they made.

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Wait tell me more about that chainmail thing

“Kaynemaile has worked tirelessly to perfect the material science behind beautiful architectural mesh, collaborating with architects and designers on projects that embolden urban environments with positive buildings. The company’s patented polycarbonate mesh, inspired by 2,000-year-old medieval chainmail, was initially created for the armor and weapons seen in the The Lord of The Rings movie trilogy and is now used on major architectural projects around the world.

“The film’s art director and Kaynemaile’s founder Kayne Horsham worked with his team to construct each garment from plastic plumbing tubes, coating them in pure silver. Once filming wrapped, Horsham dedicated himself to creating a change to the liquid state assembly process to mass produce the polycarbonate chainmail for architectural applications — products that were light, but strong enough to protect the interior or exterior of a building. Now an industry-leading manufacturer, Kaynemaile produces mesh for everything from small interior screens to large scale exterior façades. Their mesh is easy to install and can be custom created for specialized applications.”

YOU GUYS

they took forced perspective and scaled sets to a new level by adding moving set pieces to create the illusion that the hobbits and dwarves were much smaller than everyone else even when the camera moved.

every scene you see in the 11+ hours of glory that is the LOTR masterpiece is most like ridiculously elaborate or expensive–from model towers to the all-new motion capture technology used for gollum to the costumes and sets to the aerial on location shots of mother-fracking new zealand and the big impressive battle scenes and horse charges.

but then the story and the screenplay too–there is just SO much lore that is there in the background lurking if you want to look for it, yet it still remains simplified for the average viewer. Crazy impressive feat.

And the acting is heartfelt and real and makes you love the characters.

ALSO DON’T GET ME STARTED ON FREAKING HOWARD SHORE AND HIS 100+ HEARTSHATTERINGLY BEAUTIFUL LIETMOTIFS AND BRILLIANT SUBTLE VARIATIONS IN THE FLIPPING 13 HOUR SOUNDTRACK. AND ENYA SINGING IN REAL ELVISH.

I loved the books long before the movies came out and… yes, this.

I disagree with a few choices here and there but they’re really, really good.

Fun fact: after the American Physical Society held their 1986 annual meeting at the MGM Grand, the entire city of Las Vegas politely asked APS to never, ever come back.

Was it because the physicists were super-smart MIT-blackjack-team forerunners who took the casino for everything it was worth? Actually, the complete opposite: they didn’t gamble. At all. After all, they knew their statistics. Most of them were broke grad students who had no intention of throwing away their stipends on fundamental misunderstandings of Poisson processes. As a result the casino gaming floor was dead. Sometimes the winning move really is not to play.

Me the only time I’ve ever been to Vegas - had one beer and didn’t gamble a cent. Funny thing is, they happily welcome back hacker cons, and you’d think hackers would be at LEAST as aware of probability. Apparently not!

When I was a kid living in LA, we went to Vegas pretty regularly, since it was only about 4 hours away. My parents would find coupons in the LA Times in the off season and we’d go for a few days. Our whole family could stay in one of the fancy Strip hotels for like $20 a night, and there were $5 all-you-could-eat buffets with actually good food. Plus the arcades were amazing. And so was the hiking! Which is what we were really there for. Red Rock Canyon, with all its tiny caves that you can easily climb up to, is amazingly fun when you’re a little kid. Our vacations were very much subsidized by gamblers.

Relatedly, one time when I was a kid, a large chunk of my extended family went on a cruise to see an eclipse. Everyone on the cruise was scientists or science hobbyists. The crew didn’t know what to do with us! Everyone wanted the 6 pm dinner, no one wanted the 10 pm dinner that you had to dress up for. The casino was empty for the entire week. A group of passengers demanded that all the lights on the deck be turned off at night, even the pretty decorative ones, for at least an hour and preferably more, every single night. One night at dinner, my grandmother saw dolphins out the window, and as word spread the entire dining room emptied, even though it was still the middle of dinner. And that’s not even getting into how my grandfather started talking to the cleaning staff (who were not supposed to talk back) and found out they wouldn’t be let off work to see the eclipse, and within hours had formed an entire committee to go with him to demand to speak to the captain about this mistreatment of the staff.

There are… a lot of places where large groups of scientists probably aren’t welcome a second time.

the biggest scam of all with the ao3 shit is people genuinely believing we NEED ao3 and ao3 alone.

the entire foundation ao3 is built on is one from past fic archives made to tailor to a certain demographic - harry potter fic authors were infamous for causing drama between fic archives, and this was only in the 90s/2000s. look at livejournal, ff.net, etc etc. ao3 has been lying to y'all for years into thinking there’s no better options for storing and sharing fic. we can do better than ao3, and we have before.

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AO3 has never tried to convince anyone that it’s the only archive. There’s a lot of people who think it’s the best, including most of the active volunteers, but they don’t object to other archives.

AO3 hasn’t been “lying” to people to convince them there’s no better archives. More people post at FF.net and Wattpad than AO3; obviously, a lot of people think those are better. It’s likely more people post at Amino apps, although it’s hard to track those numbers.

OTW’s code is open source. Anyone who likes AO3’s structure but not policies, can make their own site. Or they can grab the pieces they like - the tag system, or the warnings structure, or the fandom label setup - and attach those to an entirely different fanwork hosting site.

For the people who do like AO3 - there aren’t any better sites. They’re the only ad-free fanwork hosting site. The only one that lets you search by tags across the whole archive. The only one that lets you download fic as ebooks to throw onto your ereader so you can read them offline. The only one that provides clear warnings for some kinds of content, and allows authors to tag for not-required content that they want to warn about. And of course, the only one that allows the full range of legal fannish content, rather than “the mods will decide if something is against the rules and throw it out, but not tell people exactly what those rules are, and not enforce it consistently.”

I am curious what was “better than AO3” before, and why it’s not being used now instead.

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what the original post neglects to take into consideration is that yes, of course, there were archives before AO3. of course there were fanfic sites before AO3 that people loved and uploaded millions of words to and generated huge amounts of traffic.

and they’re gone!

they’re gone!

because whoever owned them lost interest, or sold off the company/domain/page, or was DDOSed, or targeted for mass reporting by people who think gay content is icky. that’s the point. that was the whole point of AO3, that it was something that would stick around and wasn’t subject to the whims of 3rd party content policies or revenue-based downsizing.

there’s a lot of subjectivity in what makes an archive good, why some people like x better than y or y better than z, but there’s one respect in which AO3 is undeniably superior to all its predecessors:

it’s still here.