Isaac the Human

Hey! I’m Isaac. I like art, retro fashion, and a lot of other stuff too!

[isaac-the-human]

hello everyone!

thought id actually make a pinned post with a bit of info on myself!

my name is Isaac! I’m an artist and a writer. I have interest in lots of different things, such as movies, novels, comics, and podcasts. I also sometimes write fanfic. I like history and old things

here are a few things i like:

TV Shows/Movies: gravity falls, pushing daisies, amphibia, the owl house, veronica mars, steven universe, the x-files, chuck, star wars, star trek, it’s a wonderful life, murderbot (i want to read too but i haven’t had time), the amazing digital circus, knights of guinevere, elsbeth, pvp and parkour civilization, project hail mary (working on reading the book)

Podcasts: the magnus archives, welcome to night vale, malevolent

Books/Print Media: superhero comics, the hobbit, poetry, sherlock holmes (I've literally read almost all of the original stories. and watched most adaptions. I'm normal I swear)

Games: minecraft, ace attorney, pokemon

Other/General: mythology, poetry (just... in general. ask me to name like five poets though and I'd be out of luck), history, government, politics, chemistry, music (i play violin, am learning guitar, and used to play the piano… i’m trying to relearn), fashion, old movies, anything that’s a mystery, fencing (epee)

Characters: elsbeth tascioni (she’s an icon), clark kent, annabelle cane, stan pines, murderbot, ditto

feel free to talk to me about all of them, but the one’s in bold i know most about

thats all for now!

[eatpussypraylove]

Favorite adderall review

[joebidensbignaturals]

[ralfmaximus]

You have to watch the dosage.

[mortimermcmirestinks]

You have to watch the dosage.

[alisonzai]

[alisonzai]

[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.

[cacodaemonia]

Wow, a lot has been added since I last reblogged this 😂

I could be wrong, but I'm pretty sure Sauron did NOT raise the mountains of Mordor, because Maiar weren't powerful enough for such drastic remodeling? At least, I can't think of any examples of Maiar undertaking such massive projects.

Beyond that, I think it's stated somewhere that Melkor himself crated Orodruin, or Mount Doom. He could very well have built the mountains at the same time, but since they seem to have been in existence since at least the beginning of the Second Age, there are three other options:

They were there from the beginning, in the Music of the Ainur, and were created when the Valar descended to Arda. One could argue that the ugly shape was created by the discord Melkor sowed in the song.

Melkor created them at another point before the First Age, after most of the other Valar retreated to Aman and he had the run of Middle Earth.

They were created at the end of the First Age, when the Valar returned to Middle Earth and yeeted Melkor/Morgoth into the Void. Most of Beleriand was destroyed at the time, and it's very likely that many other parts of Middle Earth were altered in such a violent upheaval, so it's entirely plausible that was their origin.

Also, the Carpathian Mountains, as well as some other ranges that I can't recall, have weird shapes. Maybe Tolkien was looking at these and just flipped them around:

[wolvierinez]

games with like really in depth character customisation should honestly just release the customisation part seperate from the actual game as an option. i want to make. my blorbos. i dont want to spend £50+ on a game i know i will suck at

[dionysiaproductions]

Tumblr should never have given us polls. Everyday I have to see years-old polls cross my dash proudly proclaiming past-me's vote which I now disagree with. Let me change my vote!! I have rethought which Tetris piece is the sexiest.

[cannibalcaprine-deactivated2024]

masks and helmets that hides someone's face in such a way that they become the face themselves my beloved

these are all creatures to me

[ancient-debris]

Angel of War, angular and strange, gleaming silver and gold, Angel of Wonder, pure and one-eyed, looking to stars new and old, Angel of Harvest, simple and hidden, bring nature's sweetness to all, Angel of Health, mysterious and fine, beacon when life starts to fall, Angel of the Deep, crooked and cage-like, guide us across the sea, Angel of Solace, protect us from evil, lead us to where we are free.

[omnybus]

Was inspired by the previous post a while back, and had been working on this on and off for a long while.

You can see the full-resolution versions on My Patreon.

[captain-acab]

I love all of these. The angel of the the deep's wings are canvas, held up by an anchor. The angel of war's wings are blades, and its shield is a coffin. The angel of solace is a mutant, its arms deforming into wings. Geiger counter in hand, it guides us through the danger only it knows. Was this angel once a man? Corrupted now beyond hope, he can at least save others from the same fate.

[youve-got-a-roman]

this shit is so incredibly cool that i cannot and refuse to attempt to properly articulate it

[cicero-not-cisero]

As a chronic "good heavens" sayer, and as a casual rhyme enjoyer, it's been really hard not to pepper in the phrase "good heavens six sevens" into my vocabulary. It would be so much fun to say, but it would immediately alienate both young hip people and old antiquated people and really only be enjoyed by whimsically autistic transgender women, so yeah :/

[mydogatemymotivation]

the funniest thing about those 'movie!Rocky is a nudist' jokes isn't that he has to tell Grace he's been naked the whole time.

the funniest thing is the video logs Grace sent back to Earth. he nakey.

which means there's an entire planet that doesn't know Eridians wear clothes at all because their only exposure to this species is a nudist.

Humans and Eridians meet again one day, and all the Eridians are wearing clothes, and sweaters, and accessories like normal people and the humans have a brief huddle about this before one of them walks up to Rocky (probably much older now) and says, "so, uh. those video logs. you, um, you wear clothes?"

And Rocky swears on his life he can hear Grace laughing at him from the afterlife because they've both just realized that Rocky flashed an entire planet.

[chalroe]

From Lost In Translation by @quekerahkerah (which is so fun, go read it rn!!!)

[notholaenas]

rites of passage

closeups:

1. academia

2. teaching

3. family

[dragon-in-a-fez]

along with debating teams schools should have an agreeing team that goes to competitions to see who can have the fewest arguments and the best compromises

[dragon-in-a-fez]

there's only one trophy and the competition ends when all teams decide how to share it equitably

[meatymush]

this movie makes me SICK. /positive

[hexadonis]

fear’s got a hold on me

[cedar-is-a-nerd]

Has anyone made Carl x Grace angst where Carl realises months or maybe even years after Grace is launched that "Oh. Fuck. I loved him." But it's too late and the last memory one of the people he genuinely loved and wanted to spend forever with is of him standing over top of him while he's sedated and kidnapped.

Because of not that's wasted potential and I need to start writing for my boy Carl and I also give full permission to anyone ever to write this because Carl is my underrated king we need #morecarl

[undeadengineer]

biggest aroace Grace truther over here but the Doomed Yaoi potential for Carl and Grace is astronomical

[kilovanity]

sour candy buds !!