a liar like all elves and men

osama bin laden abuse you

cause of death: tried to organize an activity with more than 2 friends at once past the age of 25

So do seahorses read fpreg.

THE WRITER AND ACTOR’S STRIKES HAVE SUCCESSFULLY PAUSED THE PRODUCTION OF 4 MARVEL MOVIES!!!! thank you striking creatives.

this made me cry

I think I'm a lifelong cryptid enthusiast because I'm nearsighted. Like what do you mean the Zapruder film isn't crystal clear. That's how bigfoot would look to me anyway.

I MEANT THE PATTERSON-GIMLIN FILM. NOT THE ZAPRUDER FILM. THERE IS NO BIGFOOT SIGHTING IN THE FOOTAGE OF PRESIDENT KENNEDY'S DEATH. I'M SO SORRY.

This is from “Old Gays Try Grindr” and i’m dying

I think tumblr would like this one

Happy pride month to whatever the fuck kind of weird shit is going on between these two

“that character is a war criminal” that character is from a fictional fantasy world and did not attend the geneva convention

hard agree with these tags specifically

"The idea of reforming Omelas is a pleasant idea, to be sure, but it is one that Le Guin herself specifically tells us is not an option. No reform of Omelas is possible — at least, not without destroying Omelas itself:

'Those are the terms', indeed. Le Guin’s original story is careful to cast the underlying evil of Omelas as un-addressable — not, as some have suggested, to 'cheat' or create a false dilemma, but as an intentionally insurmountable challenge to the reader. The premise of Omelas feels unfair because it is meant to be unfair. Instead of racing to find a clever solution ('Free the child! Replace it with a robot! Have everyone suffer a little bit instead of one person all at once!'), the reader is forced to consider how they might cope with moral injustice that is so foundational to their very way of life that it cannot be undone. Confronted with the choice to give up your entire way of life or allow someone else to suffer, what do you do? Do you stay and enjoy the fruits of their pain? Or do you reject this devil’s compromise at your own expense, even knowing that it may not even help? And through implication, we are then forced to consider whether we are — at this very moment! — already in exactly this situation. At what cost does our happiness come? And, even more significantly, at whose expense? And what, in fact, can be done? Can anything?

This is the essential and agonizing question that Le Guin poses, and we avoid it at our peril. It’s easy, but thoroughly besides the point, to say — as the narrator of 'The Ones Who Don’t Walk Away' does — that you would simply keep the nice things about Omelas, and work to address the bad. You might as well say that you would solve the trolley problem by putting rockets on the trolley and having it jump over the people tied to the tracks. Le Guin’s challenge is one that can only be resolved by introspection, because the challenge is one levied against the discomforting awareness of our own complicity; to 'reject the premise' is to reject this (all too real) discomfort in favor of empty wish fulfillment. A happy fairytale about the nobility of our imagined efforts against a hypothetical evil profits no one but ourselves (and I would argue that in the long run it robs us as well).

But in addition to being morally evasive, treating Omelas as a puzzle to be solved (or as a piece of straightforward didactic moralism) also flattens the depth of the original story. We are not really meant to understand Le Guin’s 'walking away' as a literal abandonment of a problem, nor as a self-satisfied 'Sounds bad, but I’m outta here', the way Vivier’s response piece or others of its ilk do; rather, it is framed as a rejection of complacency. This is why those who leave are shown not as triumphant heroes, but as harried and desperate fools; hopeless, troubled souls setting forth on a journey that may well be doomed from the start — because isn’t that the fate of most people who set out to fight the injustices they see, and that they cannot help but see once they have been made aware of it? The story is a metaphor, not a math problem, and 'walking away' might just as easily encompass any form of sincere and fully committed struggle against injustice: a lonely, often thankless journey, yet one which is no less essential for its difficulty."

- Kurt Schiller, from "Omelas, Je T'aime." Blood Knife, 8 July 2022.

woke up today and realized that tumblr entirely killed fuck ya life bing bong so here ya go again

“NRPI: No Real Person Involved” - SUCCESSION (2018-2023)

Dreamed that there was a mundane-setting TTRPG I’m going to call “Greg and Maureen” where the players are visiting a non-player character couple their characters are friends with. But the couple is going through a rough spot! The objective was to investigate their relationship and either to help their marriage or hasten their divorce. It’s always small town and you’re always staying at their house. Players could add a little flavor of how they knew Greg and Maureen and even choose some minor traits for them before the game.

I’d played the game with another group before, but I didn’t know there were multiple paths. There’s a note Greg writes confessing to something, but depending on the dice roll it’s a different note. The content of a major plot point depended on a 2d6 dice roll.

In the dream, I’d previously played a version where he confessed to cheating on Maureen with another woman, so I thought Maureen should see the note, but in the game we were playing, my friend Celia found the note, which actually said that Greg was dishonorably discharged from the army for a gay relationship (he’s bisexual) before he met Maureen, and that he had lied about having had an honorable discharge. So for a while I came off as an asshole because I kept saying that Maureen needed to know the contents of the note so that she could confront him about what he did to her, and my friend seemed to me to be unusually blasé about what I thought was an affair.

There were other possible notes. In other timelines he had never had an affair, never been in the army, never even loved her, etc. There was another possible note where you learned he’d lied to her that he was good at track in high school (imagine an impressive mile time, which my dream mind supplied as 6:40, though that won’t even get you into varsity level) when he was actually bad at track in high school (14 minute mile). This was a lie he’d told, like, once, and he and Maureen almost never talked about running or high school sports.

In every possible timeline, Greg was Utterly Wracked with guilt about his secret. Yes, even the high school track universe.

Also, if players had decided that Greg was white before the game, you could unlock a timeline where his secret was that his distant ancestors had been in league with THE Devil from Christianity between like 1830s and 1910s. (The devil was just their accountant. He was ashamed of them for non-devil reasons.) In this timeline, you could actually meet the devil.

You didn’t find a note in every timeline, so sometimes you had to work off other evidence. I had only ever played mainly investigating Greg, but you could also focus on investigating Maureen. I think the other players and I just suspected him of hiding something every time, due to our biases. Sorry Greg! Guess we weren’t real gregheads.

Who want to play Greg and Maureen with me

bitches whose music taste is "whatever sounds good" will be like "i'm really into this band" because they liked more than 1 of their songs

when i was post op after top surgery i had a good friend there with me to help recover. but the nurse didnt get the memo and when i woke up she was like “ok i’m gonna go get your girlfriend and bring her in to see you!” and i remember being so zonked on anesthesia and so disoriented i just laid there thinking wow…… all that an they’re bringing me a girlfriend too this place is amazing

I really love the idea that Ned thinks he’s a gentle parent but like….by northern standards. He’ll be like ah I remember what this was like I can’t be as harsh as my father…..boy hostage fetch my sword I have decided you children will watch me perform a beheading instead of the traditional bloodeagle. I know know I’m getting soft in my old age (27)

One time at a feast he publicly tells Sansa and Arya that as young ladies if they’re ever stranded in the arctic (the front yard in february) it’s okay with him if they choose a swift death by blade instead of a slow one from a combination of the elements and a polar bear and Roose is like see this is what you get for voting in a fucking liberal. Maege pulls Ned aside and she’s like listen I know we’re both trying this new age parenting thing but if being mauled by bears is good enough for my girls it’s good enough for yours

asoiaf heritage post

I'm not sure if this has been talked about before, but I'm gonna talk about it regardless because it has completely blown my mind. I first discovered it on a reddit post, which you can read here.

In the book The History of the Hobbit, John Rateliff suggests that the Wilderlands of The Hobbit is actually the Beleriand of Tolkien's early mythology as it was written during the 1930's, only taking place ages after the War of the Jewels, since the later ages and maps of middleearth hadn't been created by Tolkien yet. Keep in mind that at this point in Tolkien's writings, the breaking of Thangorodrim was nowhere near as bad as it would later turn out to be. Beleriand never sank into the sea, but it was still drastically changed.

Here are two maps drawn by Tolkien during the 1930's, one of Beleriand and the other of the Wilderlands found in the Hobbit:

In terms of similarities, one of the first things I noticed(and one of the most obvious) was the river Sirion and the Great River of the Wilderlands. The name Sirion literally translates to 'Great River'.

In the middle of the path of said river is the Carrock, which is where the Eagles set Bilbo and Company down after saving them, and the way it is described in the Hobbit reminds me a lot of this illustration Tolkien made of Tol-Sirion:

"But cropping out of the ground, right in the path of the stream which looped itself about it, was a great rock, almost a hill of stone, like a last outpost of the distant mountains, or a huge piece cast miles into the plain by some giant among giants."

-The Hobbit, Queer Lodgings.

AND it is also uses very similar wording to how the Lay of Leithian describes Tol-Sirion(Tolkien was working on the Leithian around the same time he was writing The Hobbit):

'An isled hill there stood alone/ amid the valley, like a stone/rolled from the distant mountains vast/when giants in tumult hurtled past'

-Lay of Leithian.

There's also the mention of "a little cave, (a wholesome one with a pebbly floor) at the foot of the steps" which the person in the reddit post suggests could be the remains of the very same dungeon where Finrod, Beren, and their companions were imprisoned by Sauron after their disguises were stripped away. The same place where all but one of them were slowly devoured one by one. The same place where Finrod died.

Above it at the top of the Carrock would be where Finrod was buried, and the "Ford of huge flat stones [that] led to the grass-land beyond the stream" could be the remains of the broken bridge that was destroyed by Luthien: "the hill trembled; the citadel/crumbled and all its towers fell/the rocks yawned and the bridge broke/and Sirion spurned in sudden smoke."

The "two Mirkwoods" is also a big one. I always found it odd that there were two completely different forests sharing the same name, but at the time Tolkien wrote it, they weren't seperate at all, but the exact same forest, just changed and grown over thousands of years in between the events of the Silmarillion and The Hobbit. The same forest that Sauron fled to after the fall of Tol-in-Guarhoth. The same one Beleg found Gwindor in after his escape from Angband.

If they really were intended to be the same forest at the time Tolkien wrote it, it also answers the question I had earlier regarding this part in the Leithian when Sauron flees Tol-in-Guarhoth:

A new stronghold? We never hear anything about this in the Silmarillion, of Sauron building a new stronghold in Taur-nu-fuin, and it puzzled me when I first read it. But that's when I realized that this "new throne and darker stronghold" was talking about none other than the fortress of Dol Guldur itself, Sauron's stronghold within Mirkwood.

(Not lying, I was pretty proud of myself for figuring that one out)

Oh, and the Lonely Mountain? While it doesnt appear on the 1930's Beleriand map, it would likely be Maedhros's fortress of Himring itself, or at least the mountain it was built on top of, as Himring is located east of Taur-nu-fuin just about in the same place where Erebor is located. Just the thought of the Dwarves' home being within the very mountain that once had Maedhros's citadel atop it has my brain going wild. (Oh, and the fact that the arkenstone was found within the ancient hills of what was once Himring, fortress of the elf lord who threw himself into a fiery chasm with a silmaril? Coincidence? I think NOT)

There are plenty of other similar locations between the two maps, and judging by them both Eriador would be Hithlum/Aryador, with the Misty Mountains being the Mountains of Shadow. The Withered Heath would be the Anfauglith, the Eagle Eyrie would be the Crissaegrim, and the Iron Hills are what's left of Nogrod and Belegost. I've even heard that Mavwin/Morwen's house could be the roots of Rivendell.

Overall, it's so, so cool and it has my mind running wild. It really makes me see The Hobbit in a whole new light. We all talk about the amazing stories that came out of the Hobbit aka Lord of the Rings, but seeing where the stories of the Hobbit came from just adds a whole other level of depth to it all. This is why I love Tolkien's works so much. It's all so incredibly deep and rich and it just gets better and richer the deeper you go, and there's so much of it. It's one of those things that you just rarely get tired of, and even if you do, you're bound to come back to it later and I love it.