A wonderful little predicament

She/Its | Australian Girl Thing (Brisbane) | meowmeowmeowmeowmeow :3 | 19 | Some NSFW, horny on main :3

[illmadekn1ght]

they’re burning me onto a CD tomorrow

[charl0ttan]

i tried sticking my penous in frying oil but it was really scary

[charl0ttan]

i dont think anybody should be doing this

[acekoral]

Normally frying makes meat really good, but sometimes that's not the case. Really shows how complicated everything is

[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.

[empress-runner]

As for the greater picture...well, I thought there’d be nothing to it. Slap down a few additional continents. Fretwork some fjords. Sprinkle on some cities, steppes and forests. Jot down the traditional features that Terry referred to as ‘the good old wiggly river between the pointy mountains,’ paste on the names, and I’d be home and looking for a clean towel. In fact, it took a lot more time than that. I showed draft number one to Terry, who looked at it for some time and said, ‘Do you know what a rain shadow is?’ This was new to me, who took raffia instead of geography. I was given a short lecture on mountain ranges and prevailing rain-bearing winds, which gently led up to the fact that I’d put the Great Nef the driest place in the world, in what would have been a very large swamp. I spent some time reading up on the subject until I could bore people on the subject of plate tectonics and even knew what a drumlin was. Then I tried to make it all work.

--Stephen Briggs on making the discworld map

[rongzhi]

[sister-lucifer]

i would trust weird al with my drink at a party. granted he may put one of those capsules that expands into a sponge animal in it,

[rhyme-plus-zombie]

sorry i had a vision and i just had to draw it

[inkeebimbo]

Dinosaur!! :D

[serious-tabaxi]

weird al would do this.

[tamagotchi]

[aj521z]

The accuracy and precision is unparalleled 

[thegoldengals]

Opposite vibe

[nephilidae]

How can anyone hate Junji Ito 

[demigodoftheatre]

I love when you recognize junji ito’s style and you read on not knowing if it’s going to be horrific or just cute cat stuff

[misophonie]

when a beverage's container says please shake well you know i'm fully jerking that shit off like it's the first sleepover after 3 years long distance

[pankendev]

How loud are your balls???

my HOA didn't like the answer and neither will you

[innerchildabortionclinic]

careers under capitalism

helping elderly people: one dollar

Senior Torture Manager: $1,500,000,000/yr plus benefits

[frostops]

“You can’t use she/her pronouns for a character who hasn’t come out yet” I’m gonna start she/herring cis men in real life now. It’s the fault of everyone who says that shit.

[puppygirllaika]

reblog to tell prev she's pawsome <3

[hylianengineer]

It is truly shocking how much turning down the lights helps when I'm overstimulated at work. I always think "surely it won't make that much of a difference, is it even worth doing?" And then I turn the lights down and the evil static dies down by like 75%

[thedurvin]

Back in 1997 there was a goth lesbian Muppet

[mamoru]

they should invent immune systems that work

[ramonekemono]

the problem is that a lot of the times they work too well

[mamoru]

immune systems weilding the blades of legend is perfectly fine as long as they learn to harness that power only to smite evil. it is the journey of every fine hero to hone their self-control to resist the urge to fell yggdrasil even if it would look really really really cool

[saiiboat]

HELP