Darkness and Chaos

PhD with no time and less life. Skulker of the internet and all things LotR

[little-bisexual-gargoyle]

this might be the first time in game changer history where i fear for sam’s life.

[tonysopranobignaturals-deactiva]

economists really took the divine right of kings and turned it into billionaire CEOs

[tonysopranobignaturals-deactiva]

“it’s kinda fucked up to reject the business practices of jeff bezos when he rightfully earned his position under capitalism”

[acti-veg]

“About twenty years ago, I attended a lecture by a Harvard professor who talked about how corporations operate like modern-day kingdoms. At one time, she said, people believed kings ruled by divine right, and today we seem to believe the same thing about corporations. Toward the end, she asked, “Do you know what it is that allowed people to let go of, overcome, and reject the notion of the divine right of kings?” I held my breath and got ready to take some notes. Her answer: “They just stopped believing in it.”

- Frances Moore Lappé

[mothdogs]

- Ursula K. Le Guin, speaking at the National Book Awards, 2014

[tomhaywards]

Mr. Collins, a relatable king

[garashir]

hey friends where is that picture of boromir with the gondor flag except its a pride flag?

[lesbiansforboromir]

Couldn’t find it so I made another because you’re right that it’s a crime and it’s definitely my duty to remedy it

[oatmealdiva]

this is genuinely how i react everytime i see paul robalino

[queerturtle]

Temeraire you absolute icon

[just-another-cat-blog]

pride month!!!

[lemonsharks]

Is that a miette?

[jeanjauthor]

Pride for you!  Pride for a thousand years!!

[lost-and-cursed]

you COME OUT to miette? you come out to her as queer? oh! oh! pride for mother! pride for mother for One Thousand Years!!!!

[haarute]

josh ruben game changer meltdown

[romint-drake]

Return of the king

[gamechangershow]

game changer rulette 2 gifs without context

[viewtiful-kim-deactivated202105]

Hamlet adaptation where Hamlet is a vlogger and all his soliloquies are breakdowns he uploads to YouTube

[animatedamerican]

… I am unironically here for this

[oldfilmsflicker]

this is the funniest thing I’ve ever seen in my life

[kabesattic]

This is - legitimately - my favourite delivery of Shakespeare I have EVER seen (and I have seen some good-ass productions yo, in the Globe Theatre itself even). Like seriously, even though the words are unchanged, he’s stripped away ALL of the archaic pretense and assumed grandeur of ~presenting the bard~ that makes even the most wildly talented of actors and innovative of productions inherently inaccessible to a modern audience. Like, they’re still great, they can still communicate the message and (some) of the nuance, but they’re still always a step removed from being identifiable to any viewer’s lived experience. They’re still always reciting 15th century poetry. But this guy? This guy is like, screw iambic pentameter, to hell with being precious about the material, HOW WOULD AN ACTUAL PERSON SAY THIS SHIT?

Like this. And it’s beautiful. It’s beautiful to hear a soliloquy I loved so much already, and have it come to life in a way it never, ever, did before. I feel like I grasp his motivations, his twists and turns, no longer on an academic level but on a visceral, instinctive one. Because he’s presenting his mental and emotional journey in a way that speaks honestly, like a real person.

So yeah, this shit post? I love it. Deeply and sincerely.

[spicedtealeaves]

A post about this went round recently, and I’m delighted to announce she’s since come out as trans and goes by Jasmine 🏳️‍⚧️

Jasmine Brimsmayd

Actor and Writer

There’s a whole series of the Hamlet videos on her YouTube, as well as a bunch of other films she’s made

[amazingdevilfanpage]

View this post on Instagram

A fan-recorded video of a brand new TAD song!! The song is called Gold.

[pro-gay]

I went through majority of stages of emotion through this video.....

[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.

[theperksofbeingahugefuckingcunt]

Apparently my stepdad and I are fucking psychically linked because ?? every single time he makes chili for dinner I get a migraine. Without fail. And it became like a ha ha running joke because it happened so many times but now I’m living 3 hours away from my parents and I just texted my mom and

WHAT IS HAPPENING TO ME

[theperksofbeingahugefuckingcunt]

Happy disability pride month

[nose-bl]

via @ninjahijabimuse​

this is so much better i love it

[verychennoy]

Visit Original Link

this has been in my head almost constantly since this episode came out

[chronicillnessresourcelibrary]

EDS & HSD Masterlist

Shout out to all the folks out there living with Ehlers-Danlos and Hypermobility Spectrum Disorder! Since May is the awareness month for these conditions, I've collected every resource I've found so far on EDS and HSD into a masterlist...

🦓 Basic info on EDS and/or HSD:

Ehlers Danlos Explained Simply – by Doctor Clair on YouTube [🎥 video]

What is EDS? The Basics – an article from The Ehlers Danlos Society

What is Hypermobility Spectrum Disorder? The Basics – an article from The Ehlers Danlos Society

Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome Is Much More Than Being 'Bendy' on The Mighty

🦓 Diagnosis:

The Diagnostic Criteria for All Types of EDS

How Ehlers Danlos Syndrome (EDS) is diagnosed – an internationally relevant article by The Ehlers Danlos Society and specific info for four countries [🇳🇿 Aotearoa NZ / 🇮🇪 Ireland / 🇬🇧 UK / 🇺🇸 USA]

Getting diagnosed with hypermobility can help some people with Long COVID – article on The Sick Times, reblogged from @covid-safer-hotties

🦓 Resources on movement and exercise:

Yoga For People With HSD And hEDS – article by Good Health Physical Therapy Portland

Pilates And Yoga For People With hEDS – article on the Ehlers-Danlos Support UK website

🦓 How to cope with EDS/HSD:

Mental Health Care Toolbox for EDS and HSD – article by The Ehlers Danlos Society

Tips For Protecting Your Joints – a Tumblr post by @rthritis, not specifically aimed at EDS/HSD but likely very applicable

Tips for Protecting Your Hands & Wrists – another Tumblr post by @rthritis, not specifically aimed at EDS/HSD but likely very applicable

Ten Evidence-Based Strategies for Pain Relief – an article on Psychology Today, not specifically aimed at EDS/HSD but likely very applicable

Ice vs. Heat: Which Do I Use? – article by Cleveland Clinic

Kinesiology Tape: What Is It and Should You Use It? – by Very Well Health

32 'Hacks' to Make Life With Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome Easier – The Mighty

🦓 Other:

Bendy Bodies with the Hypermobility MD [🔊 podcast]

The Metabolic Cost Of Walking In Hypermobile People – how walking is different for people with hypermobility, shared from Instagram [🎥 video / 📃 research]

Dystonia in Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome – article on the EDS Clinic website

Why Do Joints Pop And Crack And How To Stop It – article by Very Well Health

Can COVID Cause Hypermobility and EDS Issues? [🎥 video]

Please let me know what other resources you would like to see on these topics; asks (including anons) are always open and you're welcome to reblog or comment to make a suggestion.