L.R.G.Carter

[lrgcarter]

Welcome To My Tumblr!

Hi all,

I’m Louis, an archivist who also happens to be an artist and author.

I have a website where you can check out my scribblings and stories and sundry other stuff. Here’s a convenient index of links:

My Website

   Scribblings

       Comics

           U.F.OH-NO!            The Lepidopterist

       Random Art

           A griffin and a fish.

   Stories

       Shanks Family Curse        What Urbi Did Next        Shanks Family Legacy

   Sundry Stuff

       Redbubble Shop        Patreon        Ko-fi        Paypal

I’ll be updating that list when appropriate, and will make posts here directing people to any new work.

Thanks for reading, see you around!

[lrgcarter]

Do you pronounce the 'e' in 'Macragge'?

Yes, obviously!

No; I'm a corporate shill!

I don't know what this means.

Voting ended onMay 25

[lrgcarter]

There's only a few days left in my first ever poll, and it's currently pretty close to a 50/50 tie between those that do and do not pronounce Macragge the wrong way. Much closer than I predicted!

3 days left to swing this vote either way!

[lrgcarter]

Kinda assumed tumblr would tell me when my own poll was finished.

But they didn't so I forgot it existed.

But a like reminded me!

And there we have it! Games Workshop said they're too serious these days to have a major planet in their grimdark IP sound like it was named by Jim Henson, but the majority of people said 'nah, we don't give a fuck about that'.

Thanks all, good job.

[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

[lrgcarter]

Where is that picture of boromir with the gondor flag except its a pride flag? Where now the horse and the rider? Where is the horn that was blowing? Where is the helm and the hauberk, and the bright hair flowing? Where is the hand on the harpstring, and the red fire glowing? Where is the spring and the harvest and the tall corn growing? They have passed like rain on the mountain, like a wind in the meadow; The days have gone down in the West behind the hills into shadow. Who shall gather the smoke of the dead wood burning, Or behold the flowing years from the Sea returning?

Oh, no, there's the first one now. I'm sure that video with the horse and the rider will be along next. Phew.

[houseofcatwic]

Shawn Braley Illustration

[lrgcarter]

This is beautiful.

I hate that I had to search for Shawn Braley to confirm this wasn't AI.

But this led me to his website, and it has more cool pics.

[lrgcarter]

Me: Hi One Wiki To Rule Them All. How's it going?

OWTRTA: Hi! I'm good! Glad you're back! Are you here to explore the wonderful depths of Tolkien's Legendarium?!

Me: …

OWTRTA: Oh. I see. You're here to confirm the spelling of a character name so your actual point doesn't get swamped by pedantic assholes.

Me: Yeah, sorry.

OWTRTA: It's Ilúvatar. It's always Ilúvatar.

Me: Yeah, I thought so, thanks.

OWTRTA: Whatever. I know I'm just a copy and paste machine so you get that thing above the u right.

Me: Sorry. I will use you to learn stuff one day, promise.

OWTRTA: No you won't. Why do you always lie to me? Geez, can you believe this guy?

Tolkien Gateway: Oh, right, you're suddenly remembering my existence? Fuck you.

[pansyfemme]

close your eyes and imagine freshly roasted root vegetables perfectly seasoned and crispy as far as the eye can see

[nighttimepatrons]

Sam trying to get Frodo to take one more step

[nighttimepatrons]

Sam psychologically tormenting Gollum

[lrgcarter]

Sam having phone sex with Rosie.

[lrgcarter]

I mostly work on a linux ubuntu type laptop. When I use the internet, everything is as fine as can be hoped for in this enshitified world.

I also have an old chrome-book that I use away from home.

When I use this chrome-book, and *only* when I use this chrome-book, the first time I load up a youtube video it will start playing at 0.75 speed.

Once I have switched the setting to 'normal speed', all further videos viewed in that use-session play as normal.

But next time I open the chrome book it will have switched back to 0.75 speed.

My youtube account is normal when accessed on any other computer.

Anyone have an idea of where I can find whichever switch I've accidentally switched to stop this?

[thekoshertribble]

Scotty’s Dress Uniform Kilt: What Tartan is that?

In the season three episodes “Is there in truth no beauty?” and “The Savage Curtain” we see Scotty in the rarely featured dress uniform. But his uniform is different from the others - he wears a kilt along with a belt and sporran.

As a proud tartan wearer myself I always loved this detail, but only recently did I wonder 1) if the tartan is real and 2) if so, whose clan does it belong to?

Luckily Trekcore has screencaps that make solving these mysteries a bit easier. The tartan is fairly simple, just black and white. Most tartans include a mix of warm and cool colors so this is somewhat unusual. (See samples below).

So is Scotty’s tartan real?

Yes! Not only is this a real (official) tartan, it’s from the real Scott clan!

[self-made-purgatories]

I am obsessed with Scotty's dress uniform. He looks spectacular. I also went looking for more information on his tartan before finding this post, and I discovered that, not only is it a real Clan Scott tartan, it is a specific tartan that means Scotty is related to Sir Walter Scott, the poet and author who wrote Ivanhoe! Such a cool backstory and easter egg!

https://www.tartanregister.gov.uk/tartandetails?ref=3694

[lrgcarter]

This is really cool!

[rhube]

Re: that other post.

'Tolkien wouldn't have researched this.'

[lrgcarter]

"Ooh, he wouldn't have understood rain shadows"

My friend, do I have some startling news about the island of Great Britain.

[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.

[rhube]

Big 'You come into MY HOUSE?' energy.

[lrgcarter]

"...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."

This is simply not how education (or, indeed, living) works. I've never heard anyone outside of the US use the term 'liberal arts' so this might be a cultural thing, but to know something about anything you need to learn about its context. And then you need to learn about the context of that context. etc etc etc.

The above lore offers a good example, but understanding 'linguistics and the middle ages'? You mean 'the very means of human communication' and 'one thousand years of human activity over an entire sub continent including its contact network with those beyond'? Yeah, that's ... that's a lot you have to understand there. Your case studies will cover a vast amount of human collective knowledge. And that's before you add in 'being aware of modern developments in knowledge'. Tolkein might not have been an expert on, eg, mid to early-late 20th century science, as in, he might not have been able to do the physics maths to make an atom bomb himself, but he'd have been aware of, eg, plate tectonics before he died.

Another consideration to add to the above; when you look at a fantasy map, you're not looking at fantasy geology. You're looking at a fantasy map. And not all maps are ordnance survey maps. Some maps communicate their landscapes using languages other than literal or mathematical naturalism.

Especially maps designed to draw readers into fictional worlds.

I don't want this to be sarcastic or belittling or anything. I'm not slagging off that person's dad, who probably just wanted to expose their inner world to their kid and thus gain an emotional connection at the expense of their own multitudes. But I wouldn't trust the work of a geographer who doesn't understand the wider context of artistic communication? Like, if I needed to hire a geographer and the two choices were one that only knew the current tasks required of their job and one who understood the wider context of their own discipline, I'd go for that second one.

And I phrase it like this because I've worked with people like our conjured image of the cinema-sin style science specialist. And they think they're shit hot. And you simply cannot explain to them why you think they're an intellectually weak asshole.

[i-say-spooky-you-say-scary]

real talk why do so many fantasy universes think giant spiders are necessary

[downtroddendeity]

The sad part is there’s a decent chance a large proportion of them can be blamed on one spider.

The tarantula that bit JRR Tolkien as a child.

He swore he didn’t have a spider phobia and the experience had nothing to do with the man-eating giant spiders in The Hobbit, the even more giant and even more man-eating spider in Lord of the Rings, or the unholy eldritch spider from outside creation that plunged the world into darkness and made literal Satan scream like a little kid in the Silmarillion. Very few people believe him.

Given LotR’s influence in the fantasy genre, there is a high probability that tarantula is the progenitor of even more fictional spiders than Ungoliant was.

[i-say-spooky-you-say-scary]

wow fuck that one tarantula

[jimintomystery]

“fantasy universes have too many spiders” factoid actually just statistical error. Georgs Spider, who bit JRR Tolkein & is to blame for menacing over 10,000 fantasy universes, is an outlier adn should not have been counted

[lrgcarter]

Also, spiders have many legs and eyes and often big butts and fantasy writers are often perverts.

[lrgcarter]

It has been A Whole Month, but I'm just about managing to sneak this in for Mer-May.

Normally I just post preview images to draw people over to my patreon, but hey, Mer-May is a special occasion.

Go check out my patreon anyway.

[lrgcarter]

It's a companion piece to this one!

[lrgcarter]

Retumbling for the post-pride crowd.

[lrgcarter]

It has been A Whole Month, but I'm just about managing to sneak this in for Mer-May.

Normally I just post preview images to draw people over to my patreon, but hey, Mer-May is a special occasion.

Go check out my patreon anyway.

[lrgcarter]

It's a companion piece to this one!

[lrgcarter]

It has been A Whole Month, but I'm just about managing to sneak this in for Mer-May.

Normally I just post preview images to draw people over to my patreon, but hey, Mer-May is a special occasion.

Go check out my patreon anyway.

[rhube]

Anybody else think about the artistic movements well never know about?

Because the early cave art we have shows stylistic sophistication and abstraction. That doesn't arise in isolation. And some of this is tends of thousands of years old. For tens of thousands of years, humans have been making marks on walls in distinct styles. And these are us: modern humans. With just as much brains going around and creativity as now.

Are you telling me the art that has survived represents the ONLY styles that ever existed?

Yes, technological improvements in tools and materials (like paint and paint brushes) help enable certain styles to develop, but you can do a lot with sticks in wet earth, charcoal, and raw pigment.

Tens of thousands of years of human art. And consider the variety in the few thousand years of art we know about.

Perhaps art historians in the feed know things that would gainsay this, but in my experience they tend to be on the side of pointing out that stylistic choices in earlier times are not because people were *incapable* of doing it any other way 🤷‍♀️

[lrgcarter]

Just about to go to bed; but:

Yep, prehistorians think about this a lot. Not just with art; cave sites are the Cave Georges of prehistoric archaeological sites. They preserve remains well (comparatively) and are therefore massive statistical outliers that we shouldn't really count towards our general prehistoric knowledge.

But caves provide a hefty portion of the the only evidence we have, and the odd pile of peat or ice or tuff falls into the same statistically unusable category. But they're all we have ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.

Returning to the art question, we know for a fact that there was art beyond the stereotypical 'cave art' era of 30,000 years ago plus or minus 10,000 years because we've found older stuff.

This is from roughly 70,000 years ago. That's well over double the age of the classic European cave art sites that come to mind when us Brits think of Cave Art. It's from a South African site called Blombos Cave, more deets here.

And there's that cave issue again, but this is at least portable art. It might represent stuff that was being done outside the cave, because it might itself have been made outside the cave. And look at that age! That's the good shit! Here's a quote from that Wikipedia page: "In 2009, six additional pieces of engraved ochre – this time recovered from entire Middle Stone Age sequence dated to between 70,000 and 100,000 years old – were announced."

An upper limit of 100,000 years! I'm a big believer in assuming that if we know about it, there were older examples. And sometimes we find older examples. So, we could one day find some art that breaks the 100,000 year mark. Perhaps we already have! There is debate over the non-functional-artistry (for lack of a better term at this time of night) of tool making! And it's been over a decade since I've had to keep on top of this for work, so I'm really behind on recent developments!

Furthermore, I find it a safe rule of thumb that if early homo sapiens were doing something, it's not much of a stretch to assume earlier species of human were doing it also. So, if we had a time machine, I would happily bet on pre-sapiens species having art.

[lrgcarter]

I have an incomplete thought about politics and stuff that nobody should be wanting to read. But I have the thought and it's in my head and I need to write it down to get it out and free up those brain bits for better things.

I was raised with a healthy distrust in governments in general and British and North American governments in particular.

So it always amazes me when I see people lose faith in the system. Because I'm surprised they had faith in the system in the first place.

I'm not talking about radicalisation. I mean more "how is this politician/party/other political group getting away with this?" and other more passive thoughts.

Caus it's like, they have money and friends in places of power and that's all you need to do anything? Unless you hit a wall of other opposing people with more money and friends in places of power? And why did you think it was ever different?

This incomplete thought is inspired by a few things.

I see some folk saying that Trump's child raping is an unprecedented scandal that nobody else would survive.

And I send my admittedly worthless support to all the victims of his rape and other crimes. It's important not to lose sight of the victims, to put their care and recovery and socially holistic recompense first. the following thought is in no way an attempt to belittle their horrors.

Because the 'unprecedented' bit is a matter of scale and spectacle. Modern power networks and economic systems and transport technology etc means a rich guy could own an island and use it as his pedophilia party place and invite everyone else with any power and money and influence.

But, scale and spectacle aside, it's not unprecedented.

One of the many slaves that Thomas Jefferson inherited control of was his wife's half sister. Her name was Sally Hemings. It is my understanding that between the ages of 14 and 16, Jefferson had sex with Sally, a person he 'owned', and she had several of his children.

That's Thomas Jefferson. President number 3. Who would have personally known George 'Slave Teeth Dentures' Washington' and James 'You've Got To Subordinate Your Slaves Kindly' Madison.

What I mean is, this treatment of people by those in power has been baked into the system from the start. It's no surprise that there's a pedo president now. Because of course there is. Why wouldn't there be? There's nothing to stop that happening.

('But the Starr Report ended Clinton', I hear some people say. No it didn't. He got the slightest slap on the wrist. And The System's problem with his abuse of power over Lewinsky wasn't what he did, it was that he lied about it. And Starr hadn't even been investigating sex stuff anyway, that was just a convenient final bullet. See above comment about a wall of other opposing people with more money and friends in places of power.)

Over on this side of the Atlantic, the UK parliament has just screwed over trans people again. I've seen a headline saying this is 'the start of democratic collapse'.

And this makes me wonder about how people perceive UK democracy.

Because, to be totally clear, I think democracy is great. Ideal democracy. By which I mean, every adult is informed about world affairs and is enfranchised to vote and each of those votes are equal and each vote contributes to the course of the government's running of its jurisdiction, without any other system of power over-riding that process. (That's a hastily written definition I'm not going to proof read. You get my meaning, don't @ me.)

But, that's not what the UK has ever had. I don't know if anywhere does have that, ever can have that, but it's something we could work towards.

The UK System isn't even trying. Literally; we have a monarchy and a class system with an upper class that explicitly has never wanted that idealised democracy. For the past 200 years or so, the monarchy (and its extensions) have increasingly and purposefully stepped into the background, positioning themselves as a tourist attraction that we, the plebs, don't need to think or worry about. But the wealth and other powers they exert is extreme. And the upper class, be they directly related to the monarchs or simply empowered by their centuries old system that enforces wealth and land as vectors of power, has a million different ways of ensuring the House of Commons can only move the political needle so far. Crumbs to the peasants. If that.

To be clear again, I'm not denying that we live in a democracy. It's just that the idea that democracy is at risk of sinking into fascism ignores the ways that fascism and democracy are not binary options. We don't flick a switch between the two. European Monarchy is a form of Fascism. Our UK bit of the monarchy has used democracy as a shield to say 'hey, we're a democracy, isn't that good and progressive?' and continued doing all the things that define fascism.

Which isn't to say things can't get worse. Obviously things can get worse. Fascism loves to tighten the noose. There's a whole poem about it.

Because fascism doesn't start with the camps. The camps are not its defining feature. (But even if they were, Britain loves camps)

So when right-wing agitators get bored of all their power and try to hit the accelerator so they get even more power, we need to fight to stop it. Because a better world is possible, and it's up to us tired masses to do it.

But we're not fighting to 'restore' democracy or any other euphemism for that better world. Because the historical status-quo has never been a positive one. We're fighting to make it for the first time. Of course, the fight has been happening for as long as people have been thinking. We're not starting from scratch, and there have obviously been successes that we'll want to carry over.

But we can't lose sight of how simply 'correcting' the current wrong isn't good enough. We can't just 'fix' the current crap US president or shitty UK government decisions.

Because those are just symptoms. And we need a full populace transfer to a new body politic.

Fuck me, glad that's behind a cut. I'm not proof reading all that. Let my gross mistakes and unstructured rambling be left as witness to my folly until they are claimed by digital rot or else I delete this tumbl in shame.

[imdrinkingmiso]

I am doing whatever the opposite of locked in is .

[lrgcarter]

Unlocked out.