I love going viral on tumblr.com. It’s like if you stood in a field and said some of the stupidest shit a human being is capable of and then like fifty thousand crows attacked you
My favorite headcannon I have going for LOTR right now is that the elves that are still around by the time Frodo gets on the scene are the elvish equivalent of doomsday preppers.
I forget where I read it, but I'm pretty sure that at some point there were millions of elves on Middle-earth, and by the end of the third age, it's down to a few thousand, aka a very small portion. These are the elves that got told way back in the first age, "Hey, just so you guys know, you're totally welcome to come back and live in heaven now without any worries" and responded, "No thanks, we're good!" and then proceeded to not only hold to that but survived the next 7.000 years of bullshit including but not limited to:
Multiple continents sinking into the sea
orcs
dragons
balrogs
multiple wars with Sauron, a literal divine being
The rise and fall of several human empires
more orcs
wargs
a bunch of their territory being overtaken and burned to the ground
And all of their loved ones either dying or sailing, even though we know that grief can and will kill an elf
Like, you can't tell me that third age elves start showing up in the undying lands, where everyone has spent the last few thousand years basking in the magical equivilant of free therapy and probably have as many defence measures as a suburban coldesac, and aren't viewed as the most feral, twitchy, paranoid mother fuckers; held together by suspicion, stubornness, and at least 25 contingencies for every situation they've collectively encountered during their time in Middle-earth.
My favorite examples of feral, hyper-vigilant behavior include:
Elrond: Security clearance; sure, Turgon may have threatened to kill anyone who tried to leave his hidden city, but he also took an entire army out of and back to the city at once, and then also didn't realize that his own nephew snitched on where the city was. His security protocols sucked. Meanwhile, Elrond had hundreds of strangers coming in and out of Rivendell for over 3,000 years, at one point completely surrounded by enemies and full of nothing but a bunch of refugees, and Sauron still never found it. You can't tell me that he didn't have at least 25 security checkpoints on the way into his city(sorry, house-that means it's private property, right?), even if you didn't know they were there.
Galadriel: Paranoia; This woman was magically keeping track of everyone she knew and even did it often enought that she knew what to look for of those she couldn't directly track (gandalf) and looking into their minds and testing them. All while having Sauron constantly clawing at the walls of her mind, at least for a few years
Thranduil: Spite; it was basically only his sheer audacity holding his nuclear bunker- cough cough- sorry, I meant vast underground halls together, while his next-door neighbor was some cursed ruins, a dragon-infested dwarf kingdom, and evil, man-eating, car-sized spiders on his front lawn.
Haldir: he blindfolded the fellowship when they tried to enter his city (super secret hideout), need I say more?
Multiple examples of groups of elves jumping out of trees fully armed and ambushing anyone who wanders into their territory. And while the characters seem surprised to be ambushed, they don't seem surprised that elves ambush people in general, leading me to believe this is normal behavior.
In summary, while the elves in the LOTR and the Hobbit seem all chill and fun, I like to imagine them as the crazy raccoons of the elvish family trees that wandered in 5 hours late.
If I might add, concerning Rivendell, in The Hobbit, Gandalf struggled to find a path there. He would have gotten there soon enough even without the aid of tra la la lally elves, but nonetheless, according to the elves, Gandalf and the company were a bit out of the way of the path.
Gandalf. Who has been to Rivendell a shitton of times, probably. Gandalf struggled to fimd his way in.
And in LotR, Elrond clearly controls Bruinen in a way to deter intruders
The siege of Rivendell by Witch-King's armies during wars with Angmar lasted 50 years. Rivendell is a house, not a fortress, and it lasted half a century.
Elrond has very successfuly barricaded Rivendell against enemies. He, cannonically, had the above mentioned 25 security checkpoints
#lotr#hobbit#silm#->#when you're singing tra la la lally no one pays attention to the fact that you've id'ed every single member of the group trying to get in#and have them covered by archers who can hit a mouse in the dark (@jaz-the-bard get peer reviewed!)
I dont know nearly enough about the Hank Green situation, considering i found out about it maybe 7 minutes ago, but it's bringing to mind thoughts already:
Firstly, on Hank Green: he's been producing so much content lately, and ive liked less and less of it, so i stopped engaging with hankschannel. Im not surprised *in retrospect* to find out that the mediocre overproduction was the result of him, by his own admission, relying on AI.
But also: I have been comparing myself to Hank Green recently amidst everyone talking about how productive he is. Ive had a lot of negative self-talk, like: "Hank Green is chronically ill just like you, but look at how much he gets done in a day."
Another person ive negatively compared myself to is a friend who began learning japanese at the same time as me, but, unlike me, they post paragraphs of japanese on social media all the time. I thought their writing skills were much better than mine, that they were a faster thinker and so could churn out japanese prose, and it made me feel embarrassed, because writing a page in japanese takes a lot of mental effort for me. While I've written about 70 pages of japanese in the last 3 months, including many drafts i revised multiple times, i still felt like i was hopelessly stupid compared to my friend.
You see where this is going: They told me recently it's all AI-written. They seemed shocked at the idea of writing 70 pages in japanese on your own.
So that's two times now where I thought I was comparing myself to other people who seemed inexplicably faster and more productive than i could ever be.
Im especially haunted by the latter because i thought i was doing everything right: i stopped posting studyblr content and just locked in and worked really hard, writing words that are between me and my japanese teacher. But nevertheless, instead of feeling accomplished, i felt *ashamed.* My hard work felt like failure because I was comparing it to someone else's AI usage.
I have a feeling that we are going to lose any sense of what a person can do on their own.
And then my question is: Who is this all for? Hank Green's productivity wasnt for me as a long-time viewer—I didnt have the time to engage with all that. And what's the point of merely appearing to know how to write without working on those skills for real? What is all this performance for?
I just think we're pretty culturally fucked right now. I dont see a way out of it.
genAI companies are now buying up rare and antique books so they can scan them and use them to train their AI. then they're destroying the books afterward.
AI companies are quietly obtaining rare books, ingesting their contents, and then destroying them -- even if they're exceedingly rare.
they've had to face settlements against stealing from current authors, so they'll just go for the old books now. they're also doing this so they have the only copies of rare books.
they're taking water, power, natural resources for their data centers. they steal. they're book burning, essentially. i'm just so angry, i'm at a loss right now.
I love this one page in Geometric Algebra by Artin. Absolutely destroying all those linear algebra courses which are just matrix computation, and teach nothing of the underlying structure.
Nothing wrong with matrices and computation, they're definitely some of the most useful tools of this age, but an introduction to linear algebra being just row reduction or determinant calculations is off-putting.
Ok so I’ve been playing for 18 years and i’m a string teacher. Can i just say how IMPORTANT it is for young kids to see a BLACK, MALE-PRESENTING PERSON playing, nae, SHREDDING on a violin? I’ve know maybe 5 black people who played stringed instruments throughout my schooling and teaching (predumably because i’m an upper middle class white woman). In districts where the population is predominantly black, funding is always low, so the instruments are crappy. Kids quit, or the program is dismantled. I’ve seen very few professional string players who are black.
Obviously there are black string players. We just don’t see them because they “don’t look like” string players.
This person is the real deal. They were clearly classically trained, and seems to have some fiddle training as well. How cool is that?
I close my eyes. I enter my Mathemagical Mind Palace. I see the object before me. I'm working out the differential equations. The derivative of the function with respect to time is equal to a constant times the second derivative of the function with respect to distance from the origin. A billion vectors rendered in with ray-tracing. I see the phase portrait. I see the three-dimensional manifold in a four-dimensional space. The shadows on the wall and the ancient beings who make the shadows. I peer into the amethyst eyes of the unyielding serpent. I have done my calculation.
Out of the suggested cooking time of "18 to 20 minutes", I will be cooking this pizza for: 19 minutes.
life pro tip: if you happen to be considering purchasing an LG TV or monitor, you possibly want to pick something else! and if you have an LG monitor that has not been plugged into anything in a while, you might want to leave it that way!
if you already have an LG monitor or TV or intend to buy one, you probably want to watch this video and keep an eye on gamers nexus for updates (or anyone else covering the LG spying situation):
posted july 16 2026
LG is doing some bad things. how bad? well. here are some very brief bullet points. I am not an expert, gamers nexus is, see the video for more information than this:
LG monitors (brand new and years old, cheap and expensive) auto-install LG's own adware-spyware called LG Monitor App onto windows 10 and 11 computers. you plug in an LG monitor for video output and this gets installed automatically. no hitting OK, no confirmation, no toggles, NOTHING.
the auto-installed LG Monitor App auto-grants itself access to your internet connection and ALL computer resources. the LG Monitor App has the ability to collect: geolocation data, device data, personal information, online activity data, contact data, and more!
...and it shows pop-up ads! because fuck you
on some affected versions of windows, auto-installed shitware like the LG Monitor App can be prevented by navigating to gpedit.msc -> computer configuration -> administrative templates -> system -> device installation -> prevent automatic download of applications associated with metadata
...but, if your LG monitor already installed the LG Monitor App, this is like closing the barn door after the horse got out. and that horse has the logs of everything you were doing on your computer! someone stop that fucking horse!!!
unrelated to the LG Monitor App, many LG TV owners are now required to tell all household members and guests that their LG TV is recording and processing ALL nearby voices. or else they may be in violation of local eavesdropping and wiretapping laws. for owning a fucking LG TV.
plus, how many businesses, workplaces, public spaces use LG TVs?
allegedly the microphone spying can be turned off by disabling microphone features, but LG has been caught disregarding opt-out settings before.
LG TVs can record everything that happens on the TV, including the video output of connected devices like phones, computers, gaming consoles, anything that happens on the TV screen.
LG was sued for their spying, and as a result of that spying suit, now shows pop-ups saying oops! they got caught spying and intend to continue spying. thanks for buying LG!
as of when the video was posted, there was no list of every spying LG monitor or TV. but this stuff is getting rolled out to more and more LG devices, including those purchased years ago.
and that is the shortest summary I can make of this situation without just summarizing more of the gamers nexus video.
Update: We are working on a follow-up to the LG story and have some disturbing findings re: LG's products. It will take us a while to parse
⬆️posted july 23 2026
gamers nexus is fairly respected in technology journalism. they fly around the world investigating companies that fuck people over and have pressured major companies to make major changes over the years.
so for gamers nexus to say that this LG spying situation is both unprecedented in how uniquely bad it is in this era of spying, and that it gets even worse than their video where they already say to stop buying and using LG products while recanting every prior recommendation for LG products?
Shortcuts to determine if an integer is divisible by:
This is a given.
If the last digit is divisible by 2 (a.k.a. even), then so is the whole number.
If the sum of the digits is divisible by 3, then so is the whole number. The recursivity of this means that if the sum has multiple digits, you can add them up again until you get a single digit and see if it's 3, 6, or 9.
Like the rule for 2, but check if the last two digits are divisible by 4.
If it ends in 5 or 0.
If the rules for both 2 and 3 apply.
No shortcut. Alas.
Like the rules for 2 and 4, but check if the last three digits are divisible by 8. (Yes, this pattern keeps going for 16, 32, etc.)
Like the rule for 3, but the sum of the digits (or the sum of the sum of the digits, etc.) must be 9.
#THIS POST IS WRONG 7 DOES HAVE A RULE FOR HOW TO TELL IF THE NUMBER IS DIVISIBLE#it's just. not a short cut#you're better off dividing it and seeing if you get a whole number than doing the method
Okay, so, basically, you remove the least important digit of the number (which is the first digit from the right), you double it, and then subtract it from the remaining number. If the number you get is still large, you do it again.
to be clear you SHOULD buy that cast iron pan and you SHOULD buy that knife set and you SHOULD buy that fancy rice cooker and you SHOULD buy that novelty mug. high quality kitchenware is always worth it you’re literally gonna be using that almost every day
“Everything above reduces to four rules you can run in about two minutes, standing in the aisle:
Look up the owner, not the name. The name is the cheapest part of the company to preserve. If the ownership trail ends at a private equity firm or a licensing group, assume the product and the reputation are no longer aligned.
Read the warranty before the reviews. Its length is the company’s own estimate of how long the product lasts, and its exclusions are a list of the ways they expect it to fail.
Buy bare metal where you can. Cast iron, carbon steel, plain stainless. No coating means nothing that dies at cycle 40 and nothing to rebuy in eighteen months.
Distrust a name that’s on everything. When the same brand appears on your pan, your knives, your toaster, and a box fan, nobody who owns it makes anything.”
The astonishing true story of three fearless female teenage resisters during WWII whose youth and innocence belied their extraordinary darin
RESISTENCE IN WORD AND DEED Hannie Schaft – Woman in resistence The national Hannie Schaft Foundation was established in the spirit of Hanni
I special ordered a book from the Hannie Schaft Foundation in the Netherlands a few years ago while doing a deep dive on women in resistance movements during WWII. Their story is incredible.
This hummingbird cake is an ultra-moist Southern layer cake made with bananas, pineapple, warm spices, and toasted pecans, all topped with t
Make this. It's like all the warm spice aspects of banana bread, with a bit of banana flavor, without being so overly...banana. The pineapple's doing a lot. It somehow tastes buttery without using any butter.
Hey. If people aren't aware, Microsoft admitted they know who you and where you are at all times and will give your info to the police.
They have a Global Device Identifier (GDID) Tracker that functions as a fingerprint for your PC that can surpass VPNs, proxy servers and countries. Although it can't survive a clean reinstall of Windows (it can survive updates), because Microsoft forces you to go to the internet and log in into a Microsoft account, they will be able to get to you.
Microsoft kept it secret and it was only found out when the FBI tracked a hacker thanks to the information Microsoft gave them.
You should be paying attention to this, and possibly consider moving away from Windows. If a government, especially the US government, doesn't like you for some reason, this could be seriously concerning.
This article specifically notes:
For journalism, activism, or domestic abuse situations, skip Windows and use Linux routed through Tor instead of a commercial VPN. A GDID doesn’t care which VPN you use, only that it’s still the same Windows installation.
GDID is the persistent Windows ID that helped FBI trace a Scattered Spider hacker despite VPNs. Here's how it works and how to limit it.
Other important quotes:
What has researchers uneasy is everything else the case reveals. Costin Raiu, a well-known malware researcher, asked on the Three Buddy Problem podcast how much of this exists on other platforms, and whether it is linked more permanently to hardware. Matthew Hickey, another security researcher, called Windows “surveillance software”.
Two things back that up:
There’s no consent screen. A GDID gets assigned when you sign into a Microsoft Account. Apple’s advertising identifier needs an App Tracking Transparency prompt and a visible reset; Android’s works the same way. GDID has neither, and a Windows reinstall only gets you a new number Microsoft can still get back to the same account.
Then there’s activation. Massgrave, the group behind Microsoft Activation Scripts, notes that Windows setup sends hardware info to Microsoft and gets identifiers back, the same tokens later used for Store access and licensing: “It’s impossible to prevent Windows from getting a GDID without breaking activation and UWP app[s].” Anyone who lost a license after swapping a motherboard has already met a smaller version of this.
friendly reminder that "grace starves on the way to erid" is pure fanon. like, it's interesting fanon, but it's fanon. please tag your "grace starves on the way to erid au" as an au
To be fair, it's partially because the numbers don't add up to "yeah we can make it to Erid no problem," at least for me.
This is super long, and it's a lot of math, so I'm putting it under a readmore. tl;dr: if you choose to believe the character Ryland Grace when he says he has enough food to get to Erid plus a few months aftewards, that's totally valid, but you can also choose to believe Andy "Numbers Man" Weir's numbers, and if you do that you get 3.205-3.21 months of taumoeba shenanigans before Grace and Rocky get to Erid where you can fuck with Grace's nutritional intake quite a bit and still keep things on-timeline
Grace says he has enough food to get to Erid and then for a few months more on page 468, but he also gives us some hard numbers earlier in the book: he has 40 months of coma slurry (page 417), and 51 days of real food left the day of the taumoeba outbreak (page 434)(Grace has had like one serving of coma slurry at that point but his estimate of real food has decreased significantly which is why I'm using 51 days instead of his estimate from page 417 which is three months), meaning he's got 41.7 months of varying qualities of human chow left when he discovers the taumoeba outbreak. It also took him 35 (six weeks, page 455) to get to Rocky after the taumoeba leak, meaning he had a grand total of 40.5 months of food left on the ship by the time he found Rocky.
We can then head over to omnicalculator's space travel calculator and start plugging in numbers to get exactly how many months it'd take to get to 40 Eridani (look I did the math to calculate the distance from the edge of the Tau Ceti system to 40 Eridani, too, the difference is negligible). The Hail Mary weighs 100,000 kg without fuel (we don't need fuel for the calculation)(page 165), accelerates at 1.5 g (or about 15 m/s^2)(page 19), and it's 10 light years from Tau Ceti to 40 Eridani (9.99913031 light years from the edge of the system but it literally does not change the answer by any significant amount)(page 301). So it takes about 43.705-43.71 months to get from Tau Ceti to 40 Eridani (like I said, not much of a difference), and if you'll notice he has an absolute maximum of 43 months of food left if we're solely going from page 417's estimates, and a 40.5 months by the numbers estimate from when he finds Rocky and makes the estimate above on page 468, so that's it. Grace is on the taumoeba diet for 3 months before getting to Erid. Except it's not... quite that simple.
While we don't know the caloric value per kilogram of taumoeba or exactly what eating it does to the human body, the two named nutritional deficiencies, beriberi and scurvy (lack of vitamin b1 and c respectively), actually give us a good indicator of the timeline, whether Andy intended it as such or not.
According to this article on B1 deficiency, you have around four weeks after you stop intake of B1 before you contract beriberi, and while we don't know what type of beriberi he contracted, we know you have at most about a week before it's fatal. So, we can conclude that Grace switched to the all taumoeba diet at most a month before arriving on Erid, most likely later.
And this article on scurvy indicates you can develop it in 1-3 months, so assuming the coma slurry is formulated to store both vitamin c and b1 long term and it didn't break down (a feat on this own considering this article from NASA, and the irony is the article is about a mission testing the feasibility of producing b1 and c on demand in space) both the scurvy and beriberi were caused by a lack of vitamin b1 and c in the taumoeba, and would've developed after about a month of the taumoeba diet (possibly longer for the scurvy), which is an impressive turnaround on the Eridians' part for producing vitamin B1, even if you assume they have it somewhere in their ecology.
So, the absolute earliest he can go on the all taumoeba diet is 4 weeks before reaching Erid, and until then he has to subsist off of the coma slurry.
If you'll notice, purely by the numbers and eating only one type of food at a time, Grace runs out of human chow three months before reaching Erid.
So, we have a few narrative options here:
Grace was lying about how much food he had left so Rocky wouldn't worry
Andy Weir fudged the numbers, the quote from page 468 is accurate, and Grace didn't actually run out of human chow until after he'd docked on Erid's space elevator or possibly after he'd gotten down to the biodome
Grace miscalculated somewhere and either has way more food than he thought and was fine, or way less, and if he hadn't turned around and gotten the taumoeba idea from Rocky he wouldn't been In Trouble
Grace miscalculated on page 468 and ended up stretching the coma slurry by cutting it with taumoeba, this got him to or past the maximum time from Erid he could've possibly switched to the all taumoeba diet and survived but then he ran out of the slurry
And if someone goes for options one, three, or four (I'm an option four man myself) then we can infer that even though the taumoeba are giving him calories, he's getting 100% of those calories from microbes, and while I don't... think anyone's researched "can you shovel scoops of amoebas into your gullet and live" in a scientific capacity? I can't imagine that alien microbes are giving Grace enough macronutrients to avoid a calorie deficit, even alien microbes that eat the most energy filled thing in the book (or he gets like, protein poisoning or something depending on exactly how many proteins to carbs he's getting).
Like is Grace starving on the way to Erid fanon? Yeah, I did have to do a lot to prove that it's likely, and even then I would only put it at the tail end I've seen some people get the starvation going in like, year two somehow, but I'd argue that Grace not starving on the way to Erid is equally fanon, considering just how numbers-oriented Andy Weir's books can be and just how many numbers there are that say "oh he is not looking good"
This tiktok of Andy talking to Hank about literally stopping the print run of his book to correct the math of the pendulum which iirc only appears in the book once and it's in chapter 2 is why I trust Andy's numbers more than what Ryland Grace the Character has to say about them
I stand by my claim that tumblr users are on average more curious and intellectually playful than users on pretty much any other major website. I've thought this a lot with regards to how many of the popular memes on here are history, science, or philosophy themed, in a way that doesn't just strike me as surface level repetition of a factoid (cf. reddit), but actually represents more thoughtful engagement with an idea. Thinking about all the really clever ways that "this is not a place of honor" has been used and reworked, or the Ea-nasir jokes, or even something as simple as those "juice reward" memes. And the boyfriend memes! Those have mass appeal here, and they're all shit like "yeah we shifted your boyfriend down an octave", "yeah we mythologized your boyfriend", "yeah we compressed your boyfriend into a .zip file". You know, like... for all that's been made of the tumblr userbase's susceptibility to convincingly-worded falsehoods, people here really do seem willing to contemplate things a little harder than people on reddit or twitter do. As someone who spends time on a number of different social media sites, the difference is pretty stark.
And I'm just thinking about this in light of the fact that, as soon as polls are introduced, everyone immediately starts using them to do game theory. Like, not even the usual suspects here, just random tumblr users! And I don't think this is because they know game theory and are doing it intentionally, I think it's because a lot of people here just have that sort of playful, tricksterly intellectual impulse. It's wonderful.
romaincrisis
s-u-f-j-a-n-s-t-e-v-e-n-s
theartofmadeline
blakekathryn
ellievsbear
tangentwithtanner
