Okay but you forgot the best part! During the scene where Aragorn, Gandalf and the other Main CharaktersTM ride ahead to go shout at the gate (and talk to the mouth of sauron in the extended edition) they were very firmly told only to ride up ahead “this far” because that area was cleared and beyond that it wasn’t.
But. Viggo Mortensen is absolutely mad and lead them just…. a bit farther than that. Everyone else was very scared they might blow up any second. Viggo said it “added a little extra tension”.
Viggo was just Like That™ for the whole trilogy, taking method acting to extreme levels:
he would spend multiple days walking overland to locations in full pack, sword, & armour when everyone else was travelling in trucks
refused to use any prop swords that weren’t actual steel
basically lived in the forest in-costume, sleeping rough under the sky, even fishing & foraging for his food when possible
often spent hours in the barn just bonding with the horses. He adopted the horse he rode, Uranus, after filming ended
repaired all his own gear by hand, which was often since he never took it off
had a tooth knocked out during filming but had the crew simply glue it back in place so they could keep filming
the instructor who taught everyone swordplay said Viggo was the best swordsman he had ever trained
carried his sword literally everywhere & practiced non-stop, resulting in the cops being called when locals reported “a wild man swinging a sword around his head" outside a gym in Wellington
an orc actor fucked up & accidentally threw a dagger directly into Viggo’s face, but Viggo just deflected it with his sword. They kept that shot
infamously broke 3 toes kicking that helmet but stayed in-character & sold his very real scream as part of the scene. They also kept that shot
Viggo insists on doing his own stunts; in The Two Towers where Aragorn is unconscious & floating down the river, the strong current pulled him underwater for so long that a rescue team had to go in to save him. Viggo survived by grabbing a boulder on the riverbed and pulling himself to the surface
It’s probably more accurate to say that Aragorn played Viggo Mortensen in the off season, so I’m 100% unsurprised to hear he put a whole crowd of fellow actors in genuine mortal peril for a 12% increase in authenticity
just wrote 10 paragraphs to my MP asking him to push back against the EHRC's updated guidance, aka the trans bathroom bill.
Durham pride happened today. the Reform UK led council cut the funding, with the deputy leader, a gay man himself, citing "gender ideology, kids on puberty blockers, and men in women's spaces" as the reason he disapproved of pride. it went ahead thanks to group such as Durham Miner's Association fundraising (solidarity forever!) but the fact still stands that this attack on trans people hurt the entire queer community.
this new guidance hurts queer people in many ways (another example: gay and lesbian couples where one person is trans will no longer be protected as same sex couples under the Equalities Act) and of course, hurts our trans siblings the most (feeling unsure or unsafe about using public bathrooms will lead to trans people going out less. trans men are expected to either break the law or simply not go. trans people will be excluded from pools, gyms and spas that don't have mixed sex changing rooms.)
i wrote about all that, but you may have your own thoughts or relevant experiences about how this guidance has or will impact you or your loved ones. so write it. call on your MP to do the following:
Demand full parliamentary scrutiny, debate and a free vote on this Code.
Support any motion tabled in Parliament objecting to it.
Write to the Minister for Women and Equalities and the Prime Minister.
or, if you don't have it in you to write ten paragraphs (which is very understandable), you should still fill out this email template with your own personal touches and sign this petition, if you're british. and if you're not british, you should reblog this so your british followers can see it.
40 days. One email. Your name on the right side of history.
Launch a review into strengthening legal protections and clearer enforcement against discrimination, harassment and exclusion of trans women
don't save this for later. don't put a pin in it, planning to come back to it later. later may never come. we only have 31 days. do it now while it's on your mind. it really doesn't take long.
As a kid you see seahorses in cartoons as actual underwater horses for the fish people to ride on and it makes u never really realize how fucking weird seahorses actually are. Forget the horse part and just look at this fish. It’s a serpentine type fish like an eel, with a tube shaped body, but it’s stuck in a stiff C shape and can mostly only articulate its head and tail. So it swims standing upright. With its weird tiny hummingbird fins. Is this weird to anyone else
it's also kind of hard to get until you see it but they are literally just barely wrapped around their skeletons. there is no extra meat there.
a tiny bony as hell animal with a prehensile tail that is incapable of swimming like other fish (so they cling to seaweed and coral). they can do mpreg. some of them are ambush predators. nobody does this like them
Someday your hands will be old and wrinkled, the skin spotted and bunching over your knuckles. And a child will watch you make something. It's a simple task, you'll have done it a thousand times before. But to that child, the smooth, confident way your hands move will seem like impossible magic. You have to keep living.
my prized possession is this loveseat I bought from a divorced dad who couldn’t tell me anything about it and in the years i’ve owned it i’ve never been able to find out who made it or where it came from. it’s got nails and finger creases and palm lines but they’re all kinda hard to see in this pic.
my favorite reddit post ever written is still this one that's iconic opening line was a huge in-joke on r/bestoflegaladvice for a long time before it was deleted and largely forgotten. I remember though
I don’t generally do any sort of advocacy things on here, but this one hits (literally) close to home.
We are getting into the final days of signing the Water Not Coal petition here in Alberta. If you are a citizen of Alberta, I urge you to find somewhere to sign this. If you’re not Albertan, I am begging you to reblog this so we can get enough signatures. We have until June 10th. You can read about it here:
Join Corb Lund and thousands of Albertans to prohibit coal mining in the Rocky Mountains. Sign the citizen initiative petition.
Text of tweet under the cut because it is loooong.
But... Stochastic Parrots.
Timnit Gebru was fired from Google in December 2020 for refusing to retract a research paper, and every single warning that paper made about large language models has now happened at a scale the industry spent 4 years trying to make people forget about.
Her name is Timnit Gebru.
She co-led the Ethical AI team at Google. She co-wrote a paper called "On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots" with Emily Bender at the University of Washington and two other researchers. The paper was 14 pages long. It was submitted to a top AI ethics conference. And it was the reason Google decided that one of the most senior Black women in AI research could no longer work there.
The story Google told publicly was that she resigned. The story she told, confirmed by 2,695 of her colleagues in an open letter, was that she was fired by email while on vacation because she refused to either retract the paper or remove her name from it.
The paper had not even been published yet.
Here is what she actually wrote, and why every prediction inside it has now come true.
The first warning was about scale itself. Bender and Gebru argued that training ever-larger models on ever-larger scrapes of the internet would produce systems that appeared fluent but had no actual understanding of language. They called these systems stochastic parrots because they would repeat patterns from training data with statistical confidence and zero comprehension. The paper predicted that this apparent intelligence would fool both users and developers into trusting outputs that were structurally incapable of being reliable.
This was 2020. GPT-3 had just come out. The paper predicted the hallucination problem before anyone had a word for it.
The second warning was about bias amplification. The paper documented in detail that internet-scale training data contains systematic overrepresentation of dominant viewpoints and underrepresentation of marginalized ones. The models would not just absorb this bias. They would amplify it, because the optimization process rewards confident outputs, and confidence in language patterns tracks frequency in the training set.
The prediction was that hiring tools built on these models would discriminate against women. That healthcare triage tools would underperform on Black patients. That loan approval systems would entrench inequality while presenting their decisions as neutral algorithmic judgment.
Every one of those things has now been documented in deployment.
Amazon's hiring algorithm penalized resumes that contained the word "women" in any context. Healthcare risk scoring algorithms used by major US hospitals were found to systematically underestimate the medical needs of Black patients. Apple Card's credit algorithm gave wives credit lines 10x lower than their husbands for the same financial profile.
The third warning was about environmental cost. The paper calculated that training a single large language model produced emissions equivalent to the lifetime output of 5 cars. The prediction was that the race to scale would create an environmental footprint that would eventually rival entire industries.
In 2024, Google's emissions were up 48% from 2019, and the company explicitly blamed AI infrastructure. Microsoft's were up 29%, same reason. Both companies have now quietly abandoned the climate commitments they were publicly celebrating the year Gebru was fired.
The fourth warning was about documentation. The paper argued that the training datasets being assembled were too large for anyone to actually audit. Nobody at Google, OpenAI, Meta, or any other lab could tell you with confidence what was in the data their models were trained on. This was not a temporary problem to be solved later. It was a permanent feature of the approach.
In 2023, researchers discovered that the LAION-5B dataset, used to train Stable Diffusion and other major image models, contained thousands of images of child sexual abuse material. The companies that had trained on the dataset had no way of knowing. The paper predicted that category of failure 3 years before it was found.
The fifth warning was the one Google cared about most.
Bender and Gebru argued that the deployment of these systems would centralize linguistic and cultural power in the hands of the small number of companies that could afford to train them. The internet would become a place where the dominant voice was a statistical average of dominant voices, presented as a neutral assistant. Languages underrepresented in the training data would degrade over time as more web content was generated by these systems and fed back into the next training run.
This is now happening in real time. A 2024 study found that 57% of new web content in English is AI-generated or AI-assisted. Researchers studying low-resource languages have documented active degradation in translation quality, because the synthetic content fed back into training is itself worse in those languages.
The paper Google fired her for predicted the model collapse problem before model collapse had a name.
The mechanism behind why this all happened is the part of her work that nobody quotes.
Gebru's argument was not that AI is dangerous in some abstract sci-fi sense. Her argument was that AI is dangerous in a very specific structural sense. The technology was being built by a small group of researchers who shared similar backgrounds, worked at similar companies, and were rewarded for shipping products faster than competitors. The incentive structure made it impossible for safety, ethics, and bias concerns to slow anything down. Anyone inside the system who raised those concerns was either ignored, sidelined, or removed.
She was making that argument from inside Google.
Then Google proved her right by removing her.
The team Google had built to make sure their AI was safe was dismantled in 90 days because they did the job they had been hired to do. Margaret Mitchell, the other co-lead of the Ethical AI team, was fired two months after Gebru for searching through her own emails for evidence of how Gebru had been treated.
Gebru did not stop. She founded DAIR, the Distributed AI Research Institute, in 2021. The mission is to do AI research outside the control of the companies that have a financial interest in not hearing the answers.
Every prediction in the Stochastic Parrots paper has now been validated by deployment. Hallucinations are an industry-wide problem the largest labs cannot solve. Bias amplification has been documented in hiring, healthcare, lending, and criminal justice. Environmental costs are larger than entire small countries. Training data audits remain impossible. Model collapse is an active research crisis at every major lab.
The question worth sitting with is the one almost no one in the industry will say out loud.
Every researcher with the technical credibility to call out these problems watched what happened to her in December 2020 and made a calculation about their own career. The number of people willing to speak publicly about safety and ethics issues inside the major AI labs collapsed after that firing and has not recovered.
The researcher Google fired for warning about exactly what is now happening was right.
The company that fired her is now the second-largest deployer of the technology she warned about.
And the people inside that company who agree with her are not allowed to say so.
Evil wizard tasteful pin-up magazine but it's all photos of like, skinny old goths coyly fingering cursed amulets, long-bearded sorcerers doing the 'oopsie' pose as their corrosive destruction spell destroys enough of their own robes to show some skin, naked desiccated lich king positioning his staff of human skulls just so it leaves something to the imagination, dark knights in full armor just holding their soul-eating blades out in front of their codpieces, orc chieftain who did not understand the assignment and is posing with a monster he killed like one of those guys-with-fish photos. Or maybe he DID understand the assignment. Hmm.
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