occasionally subtle
if i look back, i am lost
Andulka
★
Cosmic Funnies
Xuebing Du
No title available
⁂
No title available
❣ Chile in a Photography ❣
Love Begins
Kiana Khansmith
Claire Keane
ojovivo
DEAR READER
titsay
@theartofmadeline
Sade Olutola
Stranger Things
izzy's playlists!
seen from United States
seen from Armenia
seen from China
seen from United States
seen from Brazil
seen from France
seen from United States
seen from South Africa
seen from Iraq
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from Brazil
@benevolenticeprincess
Oh my fucking god god god god god i just found the funniest picture while deep into google images
I gotta ask, what were you searching for that you dug up such a gem?
It was honestly something like “fucking Bingo boy when the binga bonga bling” i can tell you exactly when i get home
World Heritage Post
I’ve been watching Good Omens for ’ll of about ten minutes and I have to say, I do like the poetry between hell’s most angelic demon and heaven’s most demonic angel coexisting
Through watching the rest of the show I went from “worst demon and worst angel- a demon that is too kind and an angel that is too hedonistic”, to “best demon and best angel- a demon so rebellious he can’t even cooperate with the rebellion and an angel so angelic he was ordered to love humanity and now refuses to stop”, and having finished, now, I’ve found myself resting on “two beings who are in fact very very human and love each other very much”
If I ever fail to reblog this, assume I’m dead
"our son made it through the war to come of age, let's fucken party! rsvp only if you're a little bitch who's NOT coming. all y'all not dead of alcohol poisoning by morning (lmao losers) get dunkt on"
the classic Finnish mix of extreme dutifulness and “we will make actual conversation after a silent interaction trial period of 6 weeks, thank you” can be really funny sometimes. told my coworker that I’d like to save the coffee grounds the workplace generated and take them home “for my mushrooms and worms” and she was just like “okei” and dutifully saved every single grounds-filled filter for weeks and weeks. about five weeks into this whole thing, after I thank her for the coffee grounds and tell her my worms must love them because they’re breeding very enthusiastically, she finally asks “so your worms… do they have a purpose or are they just… worms”. like sure I’ll save you all these coffee grounds every single time I drink coffee, 3+ times a day, but god forbid I inquire about your specific worm habits before propriety allows it. you could be eating them for breakfast for all I know but that’s your business
this post has been up for so long I’m at a new workplace now, and here’s a new one: someone finally getting a close enough look at the jar of homemade nut butter I’d been using to make snacks for days (in a reused jar, still with the pesto label on it), realising the contents were not as advertised, and saying with poorly concealed relief “ai!!! you weren’t spreading pesto on bananas!” like she’d been quietly dying inside the whole time but had grimly committed herself to never ever presuming to ask wtf was going on
#I mentioned to a coworker how my friend had mailed me some goldfish and I was so excited to eat them#and she labored under the misapprehension for days that I was consuming actual real fish mailed all the way from America#before one day I brought some for lunch and she was like ohhh these are crackers!!
congrats, this is so cursed and the best addition someone has made to this post
When C.S. Lewis wrote “but some day you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again.”
When I read this age 6 I didn’t understand it at all. I didn’t believe you could grow out of fairytales. Age 24, I understand it now. It’s not about growing out of fairytales, but discovering them once again, and fitting the last piece into a puzzle you didn’t quite know you were trying to solve.
At some point, sooner or later, the grief of the world hits you like a sledgehammer, and you’re left reeling and hollow. Everything is wan and grey, beaten down and hard, cruel and senseless. You are unmoored, so you go back to what has moored humankind for the millennia that our species has defied death to survive - you go back to stories.
You go back to the heroes, the knights and the castles, the brave stable boys with naught to their name and the villainous sorcerers that can be outwitted by guileful princesses. You go back to magic. Fairytales remind you of when the world was new (to you) and the boundaries of belief did not exist, for magic was in the everyday, equal parts ordinary and extraordinary. You recover what was lost.
I get it now, Jack. I get it.
Everything I write ends up turning into an exercise in imagining a world wherein every single person puts other people first because I see it happen often enough to know it's within the realm of possibility
I am a flight attendant. (I feel the need to specify this because the last time one of my work-related posts left my little neighborhood on here, many people forgot how context clues work.) Last week, a flight I was working had one of the strangest delays I've ever seen. The flight from Philly to Detroit generally takes about 1.5 to 2 hours. We were roughly 30 minutes from Detroit when the plane ran out of gas and we had to make a pit stop in the middle of Ohio. (Other things happened that led to us running out of gas but they aren't important.)
The plane was full. Almost 100 people, everyone tired from a long day of traveling, which is already a stressful experience. And now we're all stuck in the middle of Ohio, a place no one ever wants to be, with no clue as to when we might finally reach our destination. I had already done the drink service and essentially worked a 1.5 hour flight, which is tiring, and the passengers are all tired as well. Everyone's hot and sweaty and uncomfortable, squished together in a huge metal tube, baking in the sun. All of the ingredients were there to make this a shitty day. We ended up sitting on the ground for another hour and a half before we could fly the last 30 minutes. A 2 hour flight turned into 4. And it was one of the best flights I've ever worked.
Sitting the closest to my jumpseat in the back row of the plane were: a customer service rep for my airline on her way to a funeral; an 11 year old unaccompanied minor (kid flying alone); a 20 year old auditioning for a radio show; and a young new dad traveling for the first time with his infant daughter. Even before we'd left Philly, there was a little sense of comraderie, the kind you get whenever you're sharing an experience as a group. But the moment it became apparent that our "pit stop" was going to take much longer than anticipated, we suddenly became a group of survivors in some apocalypse movie--but instead of getting suspicious of each other, we played games and passed out pretzels.
When I tell yall we literally had some of the most fun I've ever had on a flight...the 11 year old girl was a chatterbox and funny as hell. At one point I gave her the phone and she started telling jokes over the intercom. The customer service rep took care of her while I helped the other passengers. We found out about the 20 year old's audition, and I gave him the phone next so he could practice his intros. We all took turn holding the baby (8 months and so well behaved!) and of course every mom gave the dad some advice. My other flight attendant and I quizzed everyone on the safety demo, with anyone who remembered the answers winning extra snacks. There were two people celebrating birthdays, so we all sang and clapped. 100 people (loudly, and very badly) singing happy birthday for two strangers. A woman in first class had an emotional support dog, and we all took turns holding him too.
I'd already done a beverage service on our way to Detroit, but the pilots said the route given to us would add another hour to our flight, so I decided to do a second one. Except, only three rows in, the captain made an announcement: he'd worked his magic and gotten us some short cuts. We would now be landing in Detroit in 15 minutes. I now had to do a full beverage service in about 10 minutes (this is impossible). I don't know what my face looked like, but the passengers must have been able to tell. They all leapt into action. Two of them went down the aisle collecting drink orders, and then carried drinks to the others as I poured like I was in the fast and furious series, if they were about pouring soda instead of stealing cars. We got everyone served within 7 minutes. When we landed, everyone cheered. We knew each other's names. Many people had exchanged numbers. I know a handful had plans to carpool.
At the end of that trip, I was talking to my roommate (also a flight attendant) and mentioned the 1.5 hour onboard delay. He said "God, that must have sucked." He was shocked when I said it really, really didn't.
i. i cant have been the only one to not realize Hayao Miyazaki and Hidetaka Miyazaki are, in fact, different people
remember when you were 10 and you would hang out with your friends in order to Look At The Computer together like you went to their house and experienced the information superhighway together. and then leave
How fucking old are you people?
normal amount
This is why she’s my favorite author.
Check out “Barry Lyndon”, a film whose period interiors were famously shot by period lamp-and-candle lighting (director Stanley Kubrick had to source special lenses with which to do it).
More recently, some scenes in “Wolf Hall” were also shot with period live-flame lighting and IIRC until they got used to it, actors had to be careful how they moved across the sets. However, it’s very atmospheric: there’s one scene where Cromwell is sitting by the fire, brooding about his association with Henry VIII while the candles in the room are put out around him. The effect is more than just visual.
As someone (I think it was Terry Pratchett) once said: “You always need enough light to see how dark it is.”
A demonstration of getting that out of balance happened in later seasons of “Game of Thrones”, most infamously in the complaint-heavy “Battle of Winterfell” episode, whose cinematographer claimed the poor visibility was because “a lot of people don’t know how to tune their TVs properly”.
So it was nothing to do with him at all, oh dear me no. Wottapillock. Needing to retune a TV to watch one programme but not others shows where the fault lies, and it’s not in the TV.
*****
We live in rural West Wicklow, Ireland, and it’s 80% certain that when we have a storm, a branch or even an entire tree will fall onto a power line and our lights will go out.
Usually the engineers have things fixed in an hour or two, but that can be a long dark time in the evenings or nights of October through February, so we always know where the candles and matches are and the oil lamp is always full.
We also know from experience how much reading can be done by candle-light, and it’s more than you’d think, once there’s a candle right behind you with its light falling on the pages.
You get more light than you’d expect from both candles and lamps, because for one thing, eyes adapt to dim light. @dduane says she can sometimes hear my irises dilating. Yeah, sure…
For another thing lamps can have accessories. Here’s an example: reflectors to direct light out from the wall into the room. I’ve tried this with a shiny foil pie-dish behind our own Very Modern Swedish Design oil lamp, and it works.
Smooth or parabolic reflectors concentrate their light (for a given value of concentrate, which is a pretty low value at that) while flatter fluted ones like these scatter the light over a wider area, though it’s less bright as a result:
This candle-holder has both a reflector and a magnifying lens, almost certainly to illuminate close or even medical work of some sort rather than light a room.
And then there’s this, which a lot of people saw and didn’t recognise, because it’s often described in tones of librarian horror as a beverage in the rare documents collection.
There IS a beverage, that’s in the beaker, but the spherical bottle is a light magnifier, and Gandalf would arrange a candle behind it for close study.
Here’s one being used - with a lightbulb - by a woodblock carver.
And here’s the effect it produces.
Here’s a four-sphere version used with a candle (all the fittings can be screwed up and down to get the candle and magnifiers properly lined up) and another one in use by a lacemaker.
Finally, here’s something I tried last night in our own kitchen, using a water-filled decanter. It’s not perfectly spherical so didn’t create the full effect, but it certainly impressed me, especially since I’d locked the camera so its automatic settings didn’t change to match light levels.
This is the effect with candles placed “normally”.
But when one candle is behind the sphere, this happens.
It also threw a long teardrop of concentrated light across the worktop; the photos of the woodcarver show that much better.
Poor-people lighting involved things like rushlights or tallow dips. They were awkward things, because they didn’t last long, needed constant adjustment, didn’t give much light and were smelly. But they were cheap, and that’s what mattered most.
They’re often mentioned in historical and fantasy fiction but seldom explained: a rushlight is a length of spongy pith from inside a rush plant, dried then dipped in tallow (or lard, or mutton-fat), hence both its names.
Here’s Jason Kingsley making one.
the Dry Valleys in the Transantarctic Mountains are just like “fuck it, we don’t have to put anything here, it’s not part of the main map we’ll finish it later”.
unfinished zone vibes
It is one of the driest places on Earth and has not seen rain for nearly 2 million years
So the name is very very literal. Wow.
Last hellsite standing
i absolutely fuckin hate it here
MISS CONGENIALITY (2000) dir. Donald Petrie
Sun Tzu is so fucking funny to me because for his time he was legitimately a brilliant tactician but a bunch of his insight is shit like "if you think you might lose, avoid doing that", "being outnumbered is bad generally", and "consider lying."
My personal favourite is his lengthy lecture on the subject of Supplies Being Very Important I Cannot Stress Enough The Importance Of Protecting Your Supply Lines But Also Supply Lines Are Expensive As Shit So Steal The Enemy’s Supplies At Every Opportunity.
via- @elidyce
One of the more important things to consider about any historical work is the audience it was published for. The Art Of War was aimed at fancy nobles high on philosophy with little practical military experience who were nonetheless leading armies.
It sure is convenient that all these songs that ostensibly weren’t written in English all rhyme when translated into English, isn’t it, Mr. Tolkien?
yknow what really bothered me for some reason?? he used ‘loud as a train’ or smth similar to describe the balrog’s roar. like, no ok so y'know if this is supposed to have been ‘translated’ like you tell us, then wouldn’t it have been smth other than a train, like a waterfall? idk it just really bothers me
Clearly he was talking about the train of Glorfindel’s robes which as everyone knows are covered in bells and jingle
1. I mean, he invented the languages he was going to translate, so if a rhyme didn’t work he could change the whole language if he wanted to. But actually, it’s not uncommon for translations (particularly older translations) to try to preserve or at least recreate rhyme schemes. For example, Tolkien translated “Pearl” into rhyming Modern English.
2. The train thing! It’s actually related to how Tolkien presents the hobbits as essentially “modern” characters who then go out and have adventures in the old heroic culture of myth and legend. As Tolkien says, “[The Shire] is in fact more or less a Warwickshire village of about the period of the Diamond Jubilee…” (Letters, 230, #178). It’s very deliberately a part of the language. Think of all the modern, non-medieval things the hobbits have. It’s always a contrast between Modern English (Shire) and Old English (rest of Middle Earth). Even though Tolkien changed some foreign names to make them seem English, the hobbits still have
tobacco (pipeweed), a New World crop
drink tea in the modern English way
potatoes, another New World crop, made more English-sounding as “taters”
rabbits/coneys, which were imported to England in the 13th century
a regular postal service
mantelpiece clocks!
It was a deliberate choice that gave readers us a group of characters who can serve as tour guides to a mythical medieval adventure. Tom Shippey explains it better than I ever could:
…There is one very evident obstacle to recreating the ancient world of heroic legend for modern readers, and that lies in the nature of heroes. These are not acceptable any more, and tend very strongly to be treated with irony: the modern view of Beowulf is John Gardner’s novel Grendel (1971). Tolkien did not want to be ironic about heroes, and yet he could not eliminate modern reactions. His response to the difficulty is Bilbo Baggins, the hobbit, the anachronism, a character whose initial role at least is very strongly that of mediator. He represents and often voices modern opinions, modern incapacities: he has no impulses towards revenge or self-conscious heroism, cannot ‘hoot twice like a barn-owl and once like a screech-owl’ as the dwarves suggest, knows almost nothing about Wilderland and cannot even skin a rabbit, being used to having his meat ‘delivered by the butcher ready to cook’. Yet he has a place in the ancient world too, and there is a hint that (just like us) all his efforts cannot keep him entirely separate from the past.
…
Bilbo’s behaviour is solidly anachronistic, for he is wearing a jacket, relying on a written contract, drawing a careful distinction between gain and profit, and proposing a compromise which would see Bard’s claim as running expenses (almost tax deductible). Where Bard and Thorin used archaic words (‘Hail!’, ‘foes’, ‘hoard’, ‘kindred’, ‘slain’), he uses modern ones: ‘profit’, never used in English until 1604, and then only in Aberdeen; ‘deduct’, recorded in 1524 but then indistinguishable from ‘subtract’ and not given its commercial sense till much later; ‘total’, not used as here till 1557; ‘claim’, ‘interest’, ‘affair’, ‘matter’, all French or Latin imports not adopted fully into English till well after the Norman Conquest. It is fair to say that no character from epic or saga could even begin to think or talk like Bilbo.
Basically, if Tolkien does a thing with words, there’s always a very good chance that the professor was having fun with language, and doing it very consciously (see: Mount Doom, name of).
And furthermore, the entire conceit behind the books is that they’re translated into English from the “original” Westron of the Red Book, meaning that a ‘modern’ translator could do whatever he wanted with the language to make it work for the equally modern audience while preserving the same feel/meaning. Heck, even the characters aren’t named what you think they are (Merry, for instance).
LotR is actually the story of Maura Labingi, Banazîr Galbasi, Ranazur Tûk and Kalimac Brandagamba. Maura lived at Laban-nec, but left Haubyltalan and Sûza altogether, first aiming for a hill-town just outside Sûza but eventually for Karnigul (or, in Elvish, Imladris). Maura’s older cousin and dearest friend (in one person) Bilba Labingi lived in Karnigul at that point.
The extent to which Tolkien goes to present LotR as an edited mediaeval text is actually DELIGHTFUL and also ABSURDLY GREAT; the prologue is actually a provenance and edition litany, explaining which recension of The Red Book he was working from in order to explain its likely oddities and inclusions (or exclusions).
I have often actually wanted an edition with all known or reasonably extrapolated Westron put back in, because I’m really curious how it would read.
@thepioden
It’s actually very cool how things were translated into what modern Anglophonic readers would parse as “normal” fantasy-names as opposed to like. Aragorn, or Thranduil, or Ecthelion, or Elbereth Gilthoniel. The untranslated names of the Hobbits fit much more neatly into the phonetic flavor of the Adûnaic that becomes the ‘Common Speech’ or ‘Westron’ in the Third Age (and which gives us names like ‘Tar-Minyatur’ and ‘Ar-Pharazôn’ and ‘Akallabêth’), but those names would be tonally jarring in an otherwise translated text.
That’s also why the Dwarves have names like ‘Dwalin’ and the Rohirrim… have… pretty much any names at all. Since the Professor was translating the affect of the Hobbit names into modern English and was also a linguistics nerd, he preserved the linguistic relationship between Westron, Dalish, and Rohirric by translating them as the equally-ish related Modern English, Old Norse, and Old English (not that literally anyone but him would probably actually notice, but.)
not my girlfriend just calling ao3 "archive of one's own" ok virginia woolf.......
