Doc Cocker

[inbabylontheywept]

i am banned from eating my herring inside. they make me eat it on the smoking area by the loading dock, under the theory that it already smells bad there. but it was raining today which was preventing my breakfast, so i was feeling sad and hungry and then i realized that there was a large cardboard box in the dumpster from a previous delivery. like a fridge sized box. so i fished it out of the dumpster, then tipped it on its side and had a nice little cardboard cave to watch the rain and eat my fish in. which was a great experience. very soothing. very zen. at least until the security guard from the day before stepped outside to smoke. then i tried hiding from him by crawling deeper in the box, which unfortunately did not work. instead he saw a sort of damp sniveling pale hairless creature eating fish in a box, and delivered the verbal killshot of "good morning, mr. smeagol." which is how my day was ruined before 8 am.

[beardedmrbean]

this sounds like a party to me

[artfromsoph]

Providing the group chat with enrichment today

Obviously something done as a joke has one of the best feet I've ever drawn. I would like to go ham (sorry) and really polish this for fun and then print it and put it on my wall. I feel like it would take awhile for people to notice the feet.

[sexuallyfrustratedavocado]

everyone talks about how strong and great Aragorn was for refusing the ring when Frodo offered it to him as if this man has not spent his entire life dodging leadership and responsibilities like bullets in the matrix 🙄

[lesspopped]

[galileosballs]

I have a deep appreciation for trans people in general, of course, but especially those who take the opportunity afforded by the chance to pick a new name in adulthood to pull an interesting but out-of-fashion name out of mothballs and give it new life. I'm not sure it would be appropriate to give a newly-cooked baby the moniker 'Millicent' - there's no way of knowing if they'd be powerful enough for that name - but if you want to make yourself Millicent? You're my hero.

[carbomcoco]

"these researchers published a paper on something that literally any of us could have told you 🙄" ok well my supervisors wont let me write something in my thesis unless I can back it up with a citation so maybe it's a good thing that they're amplifying your voice to the scientific community in a way that prevents people from writing off your experiences as annecdotal evidence

[carbomcoco]

they did the research in the first place because they believed you and wanted to tell people about it. they are not our enemies.

[yesthattoo]

Sometimes "they" are us who got an entire graduate degree for the explicit purpose of saying this stuff where academics might take it seriously.

[and-then-the-dragons-arrived]

It occurred to me today that if Terry Pratchett was still around, we'd have a brilliant book about AI by now.

They would build a new machine standing next to HEX and HEX would be... not jealous, of course, why would you think a machine would be jealous? But still HEX would randomly start responding to someone who would spend more time with that new machine.

I'm 100% positive that Dibbler would be mass-printing generated bad romance novels and selling them for profit. All of them would have titles like "A Necklace of Pearls and Flowers" or "A Menace of Dragons and Swords", depending on the audience.

People would buy dis-organisers with new features and the imps would give VASTLY inaccurate answers ("No, dragons don't breathe fire, this is a myth, you are safe!") that would put them in danger - and yet would still refuse to get rid of them. (Maybe Dibbler would sell those advanced dis-organisers, too, sounds like something for him.)

The Watch would have their hands full saving people from said danger. Vimes would never trust this new invention and would get extremely angry at anyone suggesting he bought one, too.

Dwarves would be very anxious because, as our dear Blackboard Monitor already knows, Words Are Important. And if those words come from gods know where, that's really bad. I can actually see the plot where they can actually team up with Blackboard Monitor to destroy those "machine" words at the end.

All that generated rubbish would put L-Space in the danger of collapsing. Because there are books that no one should have written.

[crazy-brazilian]

[speedette]

Me and my Warhammer collection

[puddox]

saw someone including "Mandate of Heaven" as one of those christian terms tumblr likes to use to sound profound. which i get where you're coming from but t☝️hat one is chinese

[yuriinullification]

holdon

what the fuck is going on in this site's backend

[mrsandman42069]

[gremlinservant]

Just vaccinated three kids and got kicked thank GOD I am selling them today

Edit:

THIS IS A POST ABOUT GOATS!!

[eikonoklasms]

i cant stop thinking about this post so bad. cat named daniel

[beemovieerotica]

[roswellsoup]

graduated and was blessed by ladybug freaks 💛🐞🎓

[autistobrat]

scientists are experimenting on cross-breeding a crab and a cheetah; things could go sideways real fast

[offonaherosjourney]

Suddenly got hit with the concept plus a very detailed visual of Moist von Lipwig donning his famous Postmaster General suit via magical girl transformation. And now I am supposed to go about my day? As if I hadn't just experienced what I can only describe as a divine vision??

[hacvek]

reminder to worldbuilders: don't get caught up in things that aren't important to the story you're writing, like plot and characters! instead, try to focus on what readers actually care about: detailed plate tectonics

[olyia-stories]

@dragonpyre any chance you could elaborate on this

[dragonpyre]

I grew up learning about land formations. Seeing fictional maps that don’t follow the logic and science of them makes me upset

[serinos-kitt]

What are the most common sins you’ve seen relating to this? I wanna know

[dragonpyre]

Mordor.

Why is the mountain range square. How did the mountain range form. Why is there one singular volcano in the center. Why does it act like a composite volcano but have magma that acts like it’s from a shield. If it’s hotspot based volcanic activity why is there only one volcano.

And then the misty mountains!!!! Why isn’t there a rain shadow!! And why is there a FOREST where the rain shadow should be!!!!!!!!

[serinos-kitt]

So what is a rain shadow?

[lethalbutterfly]

Wind blows clouds in from the sea, but mountains are so tall the clouds can't get past 'em, so you get deserts on the windward side of mountain ranges because clouds can't get there to water the land, or do so only very rarely.

[roach-works]

this is because, as clouds are forced upwards by rising land, they cool and dump their rain. so the side of the mountain facing the ocean (or an inland sea, or a great lake) gets all the rain as the clouds are squeezed out, and the opposite side gets nothing.

my favorite thing is the american great lake snowbelts! so, the 'flow' of weather across north america, in very general terms, blows from the northwest on down south and east to the gulf of mexico.

so the wind is blowing from west to east, and in the winter it's a dryer wind than in the summer because it's colder. but after blowing across a great lake for a hundred miles, the wind is wet again. and that wet turns into snow. so for all of these lakes, the big cities are on the west side, not the east sides, because the east sides absolutely suck to live on.

the sole exception is buffalo, NY, which literally has to be there because, unfortunately, that's where all the important canal stuff between lake ontario and lake erie is happening.

also this always strikes me as cool, check out where cleveland is:

it's right at the edge of that snowbelt. and you see way more cities west of it than east, too.

[beatrice-otter]

#but again. mordor looks like that becaue sauron made it#and he's an ass

On a Watsonian level, sure.

On a Doylistic level, Mordor looks like that because plate tectonics was a fringe, ludicrous, laughable theory that nobody outside serious geology nerds had ever heard of until scientists proved seafloor spreading in the early 1960s. The first edition of the LotR trilogy was published in 54-55. We literally did not know that plate tectonics was real until almost a decade after the book was published, so obviously, it was not something Tolkien could have been considering as he made his maps.

I don't know enough meteorological history to know when white people figured out about rain shadows and added it to geology classes, or what would have been taught about volcanoes and such. But any education Tolkien got on the subject would have been in childhood/adolescence; his college education focused on the liberal arts, not the sciences, and his professional study was linguistics and the middle ages. So anything Medieval and earlier European authors wrote about he had a pretty good chance of knowing about. But not much exposure to modern science. So his science knowledge was probably limited to "what English schools taught at the turn of the 20th Century."

[whetstonefires]

I mean, it's true he didn't know about plate tectonics, but he did know what mountains look like, and that it's not normally That. And it wasn't his style to break that kind of norm without cause.

LotR has recurring themes of the reckless imposition of one's will on the natural world creating ugliness, an order you thought was inherently an improvement that in fact is inferior to what you have displaced. (Typified by reckless tree-felling; a reflection of the despoiling of the English countryside and the world by Progress.)

Mordor is a rectangle because Sauron is an asshole.

[beatrice-otter]

#the rain shadow thing otoh was undoubtedly total ignorance#but those mountains were made as the fortress of a demigod#too steeped in evil to understand beauty#it's *supposed* to look like something that Shouldn't Exist#like quite often this is something that happens in worldbuilding yes#things are arranged Wrong because a person doesn't grasp the underlying logic#but mordor is a bad example for the same reason it's an obvious one#it's So Very Wrong because it was designed to be wrong#to give you a bad feeling with how much it shouldn't look like that#if he just wanted it unapproachable on all sides it could've been in a caldera formation it didn't *need* corners#the corners were a choice#tolkien's job involved lots of looking at maps and things okay#meanwhile people whose lives revolved around the weather generally knew where the rain happened#long before it was formalized into 'rain shadow effect'#people not having The Science doesn't mean they don't have eyes and brains

[maryellencarter]

I wrote an entire paper in college analyzing the geology of the Misty Mountains and to a lesser extent the White Mountains (the Misty Mountains are easier because we get a cross-section via Moria). One thing I discovered that still knocks me for a loop when I think about it is:

Moria is the only place in Middle-Earth where mithril is found, right? That's kind of a big deal. So, why? What makes that location so special? Is it just random?

I found a paper that had just been published *that year*, 2011 or 2012 as I was writing it, that studied the locations of precious-metals mines in the Pyrenees, the similarly long skinny mountain chain that divides Spain and France. This paper discovered that where there was a bend in the mountain chain, from one of the continental plates having an awkward corner in it that got subducted under the other plate, that had dug deeper into the mantle and caused precious-metal-bearing ores to flow up to the surface in ways they didn't do anywhere else in the Pyrenees.

There's a conversation in The Fellowship of the Ring where one of the hobbits -- I don't have my copy handy or I'd get the direct quote -- asks why they can see the Misty Mountains ahead of them at one point if they're still heading south from Rivendell, and it's explained that south of Caradhras (which you may recall is the surface mountain under which Moria runs) the mountain chain bends and runs southwest instead of due south for a while.

Tolkien had absolutely no way to know *why* this particular feature of a mountain range was associated with intrusions of rare and unique metal ores, but he had gone backpacking in mountains enough to know How Things Should Look.

(And as prev excellently points out, when Jirt made screwed-up geology it was very much on purpose. Mordor shouldn't be square! Mount Doom shouldn't be doing any of the things it does! A composite volcano shouldn't even have especially hot lava! Even the Gulf of Udun, the circular feature at the upper left corner of the square, shouldn't be like that -- perfectly round features should be impact craters or calderas, not The Mountains Just Do This In A Suspiciously Convenient Way. These are all the way they are because Sauron forced them to be, in defiance of the laws of nature. Remember, he's akin to Balrogs and was a Maia of Aulë -- he's a volcano spirit in many ways.)

[sunflowergardens-world]

Amazing work by the LoTR fandom, as always.

[mysteryteacup]

This also serves as an excellent example of why worldbuilding needs - more than realism - to be cohesive and work with the themes of your story.

[lotrheritageposts]

LOTR Heritage Post

[stranglerfigpudding]

i don't care about monday's goals, tuesday wednesday dig some holes, thursday clean my mandibles, it's friday i'm a bug