Daff @daffodilous - Tumblr Blog

This is gonna take some work huh

Reborn Glorfindel taking a break by a drinking fountain decorated with a statue of Ecthelion

He sees many of them during his travels. And often - if someone passes by while he refills his waterskin - he asks about the statues, trying to grasp what this person so dear to him could mean to them, hundreds of miles and years away from the ruins of Gondolin.

‘It’s the Lord of the Fountains. Keeps the water clear.’

‘And what are the flowers for?’

‘When praying for protection, one should offer a flower. It is said that he likes golden ones specifically.’

He sees many of them - usually finding Him reduced to a set of attributes: his flute, his hair tied up, a wide-sleeved robe: a template on which the craftsmen elaborate according to their local styles. Sometimes he sees one that actually resembles the character from those aged songs. Marble eyelids look as if they are about to flutter open and greet Glorfindel with the light of Aman framed by two dark rings. He asks the passerby whether they knew the sculptor, wondering if they were one of the Gondolindrim. But to the stranger, this is just a part of the city’s decor. He does not remember hearing any prayers while in Mandos (because why would anyone pray to him? When he meets him, he will bully him for becoming a deity). But in case Ecthelion could hear them - beside the withered flowers he throws a strand of his golden hair.

silmaspens

Here’s some character concepts I did for Children of Hurin ✨

From left to right: Thingol, Melian, Nellas, Mablung, Morwen, Turin, Nienor, Hurin, Beleg, Gwindor, Finduilas, Orodreth

stealingmyplaceinthesun

i identify with Turin Turambar because I too have trouble making friends and never listen to anyone’s advice and everything I touch turns to ruin

stealingmyplaceinthesun

Turin Turambar also known as Tolkien’s Florida Man

egobarri

I rewatched The Lord of the Rings movies last week, and felt the urge to draw this disaster elf… ❤

mellorian-art

A pleased Glorfindel to welcome the 500th follower of my art blog. \o/ I hope they like Tolkien or, at least, handsome elven lords. ^^

moonfaery

theusualemptypie

Just some Kuzco doodles ✨

musashigouda-deactivated2019032

hey ao3 can you like give the extra $38k you made from this month’s funds drive to charity

blooming-wilting

You know it legally is a charity, right?

If x charity aims for £10, but gets £15, would you expect then to give back the extra five or give it then to another charity? No. Any extra costs go into the “rainy day” fund; sometimes servers crash or break, sometimes false reports are made that require the legal team, sometimes you need to hire coders or what not to implement new features or fix bugs or deal with broken code …

The money they aimed for is the bare minimum, which goes towards things like basic server costs and domain names and legal advice and so forth, but they don’t just “pocket” the rest (as people claim). It’s not a business. It has no advertisements. It needs some “rainy day” cash to function.

You can’t ask a charity to give money to another charity.

It needs what it gets to function and improve.

fangasmagorical

kiena-tesedale replied to this post

They don’t “pocket” excess money. They have a publicly accessible budget - waaaay more info than most charities, in fact. In it, you can clearly see where each dollar goes. (Also, you are vastly underestimating either how much traffic AO3 gets or how much servers/hosting costs.)

In my experience, people who don’t work in web design and hosting just have no concept of how heavy a load something like AO3 would have. Not only is the traffic absolutely buck wild, but the quantity of data that archive needs to store is fuckoff crazy. I’m talking “more than the library of congress” crazy. The only reason it doesn’t require Netflix levels of data serving is that it’s text based rather than video.

AO3 is in the top 300 websites in the world, and the top 100 in the US. It is the number 2 literature website.

Number 2 in the entire world. JSTOR is 20.

It sees about 6 million people a day. About 250k an hour. Each of those people is loading multiple pages, many are running searches that execute on literally hundreds of potential variables per search. The demands involved are astronomical.

JSTOR, btw, makes 85 million dollars a year.

It’s 18 ranks below AO3′s traffic, and takes in 650 times the amount of money.

But let’s say you think that’s an unfair comparison. Would you say that the Project Gutenberg Literature Archival Group- another text based archive that handles literature operating outside traditional copyright requirements- is more similar?

Because it sees all of 4% of the traffic that AO3 handles.

Care to guess its budget?

Double that of AO3.

AO3 is doing shit on the kind of shoestring budget that I fully, 100% cannot comprehend. And that’s just the archival service.

The 130k also pays for the OTW’s legal team, which they use to defend the right of fandom to fucking exist.

It’s absolutely batshit fucked up that people are fighting to have the OTW defunded and AO3 shut down. They are the only organized group that actually stands directly between fandom- all the art and the fics and the vids and the music and the chats and the memes and everything we love about interactive, transformative work- and an incalculable amount of lawsuits.

mrspider-deactivated20221213

series you like but would not go within a ten foot radius of a cishet man who liked them

roxilalonde-deactivated20251105

been seeing this tag on ao3 called “mutually unrequited” and i dont mean to nitpick but like….thats not…..what it means…………..

roxilalonde-deactivated20251105

“mutually unrequited” okay so they just don’t like each other

zimsrightantenna

Wait this is actually a hilarious concept, they both think the other is in love with them but they both are very not in love with each other but they try to be nice and end up going on dates to not hurt the other’s feelings while trying to figure out how to let the other down gently but it keeps spiraling

cargopantsman

One of them finally cracks at the wedding and says they can’t go through with it and the immediate relief of the other can be felt in the entire room.

lendmyboyfriendahand

I read the tale of Arwen and Aragorn again in the appendices and I'd kind of forgot about this bit. And the implications are hilarious.

It's not that Aragorn doesn't put two and two together that this pretty elven lady is Elrond's daughter, it's that he literally didn't know Elrond had a daughter. He's lived in Elrond's house for 18 years and she somehow never came up.

This means either a) teenage Aragorn was just that oblivious b) Elrond literally doesn't mention the existence of his family members when they live elsewhere even for his own non-controversial daughter, or c) both.

A) is fun. Aragorn just doesn't notice the extra room in the family wing, the family portraits of Elrond and Celebrian and three children, the garden laid out to accommodate walking around in floor length skirts. All his ranger skills are him trying to make up for this and get Elldan & Elrohir to stop laughing at him.

B) means Elrond could have more family members randomly across Middle Earth and it wouldn't come up. Maglor, Elured and Elurin, or your favorite mysteriously disappeared elf (or dead, if Glorfindel is back Turgon can be too) stops by Rivendell regularly, they just weren't there at the same time as Frodo or Bilbo so they aren't mentioned in the text. This would also explain why singing a tale of Earendil is considered bold. Aragorn didn't even know Elrond was descended from Luthien until Elrond sat him down for "you're the heir of Isildur and here's what that means."

I suppose there's also option d) Arwen is studying magic with Galadriel and no one gossips about her because she might overhear it in Galadriel's mirror.