Can we please talk about how the most criminally underrated comedic aspect of the legendarium is the length of Elros’ kingship. Like bro caused the funniest succession crisis known to mankind when he died because his son, who was almost 400, abdicated on the spot because he was too old and passed the kingship to his own son right.
Which implies that abdication due to age was absolutely a possibility. An option, in fact. One which Elros clearly didn’t take up. Why? Because in my book, motherfucker was having way too much fun. Bro watched his son start to hobble around the place and was like ‘yeah but I like fucking and dining and wining and hunting, I’m keeping the crown, sucks to be you, major loser’. He gives me young Robert Baratheon vibes right. I know my beloved himbo was drinking to excess every night and streaking nude through the courtyards with his hunting buddies while Elrond learned to play depressing tunes on the harp and pulp herbs or whatever the fuck he was doing back in Middle Earth. I know Elros laughed like 20 times a day. I know you could hear him from four streets away. I know he had like 30 illegitimate children because his wife probably didn’t live even half as long as him. At least 30. I know his sneeze was audible from the moon.
Anyway just imagine being Vardamir and being like ‘dad is it my turn for the crown now?’ every fifty years and your dad just lifting a finger and going ‘no 😇☝🏻’. And you have to tell yourself not to take offence at this because your dad grew up in like the worst time to grow up ever and had the most traumatic childhood and was practically orphaned by six. Like of course he wants to spend his dying days drinking and dancing right. Unfortunately his dying days last 400 years long. I tell you this, in my mind, the only reason why the Númenoreans canonically have a tradition of abdicating a few years before their death is because final-stage Elros went down in history as the most irritating monarch to exist.
Because even though his children and some other descendents lived to 3/400 etc, even the longest reigning ones only spent like 150 years on the throne at most. Not so with Elros. Elros’ ass was parked firmly on the throne for four hundred years straight. And Númenor is canonically a swift-advancing society right. Four hundred years is a wacky amount of time. In terms of technological advancement at least. Imagine Queen Elizabeth the First was still kicking around on the throne right now. Imagine her managing Brexit and having to do a TikTok dance to get tourists into Buckingham Palace. Imagine the President was still George Washington. Imagine George Washington having to deal with ChatGPT and taking publicity photos with Beyoncé. Imagine Emperor Jahangir encountering a Big Mac.
And it’s even funnier with Elros because this guy wasn’t just raised by elves, he was raised by—due to kidnap-adoption circumstance—the fucking Noldor of all elves. Not just any Noldor but a son of Fëanor, freshly departed from the courtly halls of Aman. They invented the world ‘nostalgia’ when the guy who wrote the dictionary took one look at Maglor Fëanorian. What’s more, he grew up in what was the most devastating war the world had ever seen. So I am sure that Elros’ views are somewhat archaic at best. He makes your extremely conservative grandpa sound like Che Guevera.
Oh, and elves are technically hardier etc, so any time there’s a shortage in Númenor this guy is literally out here saying ‘let them eat cake’ and genuinely means it well, because he, Elros Tar-Minyatur, has on multiple occasions survived by eating one small bite of cake a day. I just know that in the last fifty years of his reign, he blanket vetoed every single workplace hazard control measure because he thinks ‘health and safety has gone mad’. He doesn’t see the point of paving a road. He tries to outlaw whatever the Númenorean version of a miniskirt is and his daughter has to literally threaten him out of it. The whole ‘dancing bears’ thing happened because the wrong people caught Elros and his hunting buddies having yet another post-hunt cock measuring competition and afterparty at the ripe young age of 250 and the royal PR team had to come up with something. And does his language shift and adapt to the needs of society? Absolutely not. In his last decade, 80% of his vocabulary is considered a slur.
And the cherry on this cake? The cherry on this cake is the fact that, once again canonically, my guy Elros was pretty young and spry until he was literally dying. And I assume that meant he also looked pretty young and spry because there’s no way for a human body to look 500 years old. So imagine sitting in at the royal council trying to, idk, bring forth the idea of indoor plumbing and the crankiest old man stands up and gives a speech about how in HIS day people just shat in a pot under the bed and emptied it the next day and HE’S five hundred years old so CLEARLY it’s not going to kill people to not have a sewage system. “I pissed in a pot the day I was born and I pissed in a pot this morning, and I’ll piss in a pot on my deathday” and you can’t even go ‘okay grandpa time for bed’ and wheel him out. Because he’s 6’4 and built like a brick shithouse and has the smoothest skin you have ever seen. ‘Grandpa’ would put you in a fucking headlock if you tried to wheel him to bed. ‘Grandpa’ is your king.
Also the fact that he just randomly decided to die at 500. My personal headcanon here is that that was the morning he woke up with his first hangover ever. He has spent 400 years drinking and fucking and eating enough for ten people and one fine morning he wakes up with a mildly dry mouth and a slight headache. Motherfucker marches off to his son’s room, throws the door open, fucking yeets the crown onto his head, and promptly lays down to die because a world in which he, Elros Tar-Minyatur, is subject to a mild hangover, is not a world which he, Elros Tar-Minyatur, wishes to occupy.
Think about that. The Peredhel line, mired in tragedy, sunk neck deep in mortal consequences and political suicides and passive endurance. And this one guy, who one hundred percent had a fuckchair that he used to his dying day, who chose to die when he did purely because his life was fucking great and he wanted to go out on a high.
What a hopeful mythos!!!
What I’m trying to say here is, we have so much wonderful fiction about Elros the Menace as a child, yet not nearly enough conceptions of Elros the Menace as an adult. I know that the entirety of the palace in Númenor tried to bell him like a cat by the time he reached 450. His ministers would draw straws every year to see which one of them had to crawl up to the palace and beg him to abdicate. And each time, he would say ‘lol no’ except he wouldn’t even do that, he would make his pet monkey do it. Because he has a small pet Capuchin monkey to which he taught sign language. Because he’s a peacetime king and is 499 years old and he was born in a war and if he wants a pet monkey to speak for him, then by god will a pet monkey speak for him so you better fucking address Elros Tar-Minyatur’s pet monkey as your royal highness or get executed for treason at dawn.
this is the one art form I genuinely just cannot get my brain to accept as real. I’ve watched sped-up videos of it being done, read about it, seen in-progress marble statues and I still just can’t get it to sink in or stick. My mind doesn’t want to believe that any person has ever been able to start with a big block and break little bits off of it until it looks like a finely detailed person. At some point it has no recognizable shape and they still know where and how deep they should take a chip out of it that’ll still be the right decision 50,000 fucking chips later?!?
Hi yes I have been there and seen all of these IRL and I have some more pictures to share:
Insanely detailed feet with veins from “Aeneas, Anchises, and Ascanius”
Another foot from the same statue because a) he textured underside of the foot and the folds of skin in the arch and b) can you see the light coming through the thin marble between the toes?
One of the mouths of Cerberus from “The Rape of Prosperina”.
Prosperina/Persephone’s facial expression and HAIR TEXTURE
Hades’ hair as well - this man was entirely too good at making CURLS out of ROCK.
A (poorly lit) close-up on the tree textures from “Apollo and Daphne”.
Hand, sling, and rock from “David” which I think deserves to be at LEAST as well-known as Michelangelo’s. Saw them two days apart and I prefer Bernini, honestly.
Facial expression from “David” - I just love the character in this so much.
Kind of a weird angle but look at the texturing on the sling pouch!!!
We also got to see one of Bernini’s earliest works (possibly his very first) in the Uffizi; it’s not currently on display, unfortunately, but look at this:
Forgive the poor photo quality but. He was 14 when he carved this. FOURTEEN.
Man was a straight-up wizard.
In conclusion: if you get the chance to visit the Borghese Gallery in Rome (which has the most Bernini sculptures gathered in one place), do it. The “Ecstasy of St. Theresa” is in a church a short walk away from there, too, and well worth a visit. There are also several more Berninis in churches around Rome which can be visited for free or for a nominal donation! Just… be smarter than we were and make sure you’re not trying to visit them on days they have services.
In Japan (and less commonly in China), there’s a concept of a 30-hour day.
Not in the sense that two days would be 60 hours, but more that the days overlap between midnight and 6 AM. So, for instance, it something happened 2 AM on Sunday, you could say “2 o’clock on Sunday”, but you could also say “26 o’clock on Saturday”.
Which MAKES SO MUCH SENSE. When you talk about things happening “last night”, it doesn’t suddenly stop being “last night” the instant the clock strikes midnight because I’m not Cinderella.
In conclusion, I wish America had this so I could throw it in the face of every smug friend who says “DON’T YOU MEAN LATER TODAY????” when I tell them “see you tomorrow” at two minutes past midnight.
Anime aired from around 11 p.m. until the wee hours of the morning, occasionally indicated by the odd-looking “22:00-27:00” notation. […]
The trope name refers to the odd way of noting when the shows start airing; it’s common to see a show aired at 1:00 am listed at “25:00”. This is largely done to align the schedule with that of the previous day; many Japanese TV networks still sign off in the middle of the night, and those who don’t will only switch to “the next day”’s programming at 4 am or so.
Times past midnight can also be counted past the 24 hour mark, usually when the associated activity spans across midnight. For example, bars or clubs may advertise as being open until “26時” (i.e. 2 am). This is partly to avoid any ambiguity (2 am versus 2 pm), partly because the closing time is considered part of the previous business day, and perhaps also due to cultural perceptions that the hours of darkness are counted as part of the previous day, rather than dividing the night between one day and the next. Television stations will also frequently use this notation in their late-night scheduling. This form is rarely used in conversation.
cultural perceptions that the hours of darkness are counted as part of the previous day
idk about you, but I have the same cultural perceptions. Let’s get this popularized in the US!
In some cultures the day changes over when the Sun sets, in others when the Sun rises. Midnight is a pretty unintuitive convention, but I can see its value for some purposes.
But relaxing the requirement that ‘every moment can only be referred to by a single time’ is a very elegant solution, and very obvious in retrospect.
In undergrad, when so many all-nighters were being pulled, and people waking up at like 8 PM to start homework, “good morning” was a tricky concept. So one set of criteria was 2-of-3 of {you woke up | you ate a meal | the sun has risen}.
I love that opera sits in this limbo where it's extremely well-known but not really beyond a surface level recognition, so you get commercials for makeup or whatever to the tune of the I Hate Women So Much It's Unreal aria
#in the first bridgerton book daphne describes her crush feelings as if her heart is playing the queen of the night aria from the magic flute#which i can totally see if you have never found out what the words mean. very high and fluttery.#but the lyrics are along the lines of THE VENGEANCE OF HELL BOILS IN MY HEART. IF YOU DON'T MURDER THAT MAN I WILL DISOWN YOU.#and i laughed so hard i had to put the book down
#lmaooooo #my fave is that episode of white collar where neil is doing a theft #and the music they play over it is leporello's 'here's the list of all the hundreds of women my boss has fucked' aria from don giovanni #it's supposed to just sound grand and sophisticated but the guy is singing about how DG fucks tall women short women #fat women skinny women princesses and peasants he fucks them all! #and here's the numbers broken down by nationality! #he's fucked over 1000 women in spain you know!
#oh and he's singing all this to a former conquest who tracked DG down because he promised to marry her then ditched her #anyway it's a lot
From The Languages of Tolkien’s Middle-Earth by Ruth S. Noel. Though I reject her “makes one wonder” comment entirely. That pun is frankly the crowning glory of the Silm.
I hate that I’m always trying to find cool biology themed stuff to wear but all the “nature inspired” clothing companies just have like two crossed arrows or a minimalistic mountain on a sweatshirt. Fucking lame, that’s barely even nature-adjacent. Put the life cycle of a salamander on a jacket, put hyena skeleton patterns on leggings, put a damn field guide of birds of prey on a peacoat and THEN you can have my money. Do NOT give me a shirt with a leaf on it that says “stay wild” or some bullshit I would much prefer clothing that broadcasts to everyone around me how many teeth an adult Jaguar has or how some pitcher plants can catch and digest rats.
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