no aesthetic, no vibes

[dragon-in-a-fez]

the thing about being "good with kids" is all it takes is literally just not trying to control and mould them with every interaction. it's just being a normal person and engaging with them through normal interactions like having conversations and playing games. it's just being genuine and friendly and not perceiving them as lumps of wet clay you are there to shape. "oh you're so good with kids" thanks it's because I think they are people

[mindblowingscience]

Universal surface-growth law confirmed in two dimensions after 40 years

Crystals, bacterial colonies, flame fronts: the growth of surfaces was first described in the 1980s by the Kardar–Parisi–Zhang equation. Sin

Crystals, bacterial colonies, flame fronts: the growth of surfaces was first described in the 1980s by the Kardar–Parisi–Zhang equation. Since then, it has been regarded as a fundamental model in physics, with implications for mathematics, biology, and computer science. Now—40 years later—a Würzburg-based research team from the Cluster of Excellence ctd.qmat has achieved the first experimental demonstration of KPZ behavior on 2D surfaces in space and time. This was made possible by sophisticated materials engineering and a bold experimental approach: researchers injected polaritons—hybrid particles composed of light and matter—into the material. The results have been published in Science.

Continue Reading.

[oceaxe-ifdawn]

POLARITONS??

A hybrid particle that is both light AND matter???

This is some alchemical bizness

[noknowshame]

clearly some of you have not been to the labyrinth of pestilence deep beneath kentucky

[noknowshame]

alright so when I was a teenager I went to this bug-themed summer camp for socially stunted nerds and on the way back from it I visited the university of kentucky. I met with an entomologist there and while we were touring the department he asked "wanna see something cool?" so he took me down an elevator to what must've been a sub-sub-sub basement on a card-access only floor, and after turning several more corners we went through two sets of (I'm not even exaggerating) 12-inch thick doors, opening onto one long as fuck corridor. each side of this hallway was lined with about 50 refrigerators. and each and every single one of these refrigerators was filled with hundreds of thousands. of live. bedbugs. the very reasonable explanation for this was that they were doing research on insecticides and needed to test them on real samples, but they could not under any circumstances allow them to escape, so they had to be kept under area 51 levels of overkill containment. but reasonable or not that was very much not what I anticipated seeing that day. so yeah. I decided after that I did not want to become an entomologist

[curlicuecal]

absolutely baffled to get to the end of that story and hear you decide NOT to be an entomologist but possibly that's the entomologist in me speaking

[bauliya]

so women are supposed to grin and bear the books, the comics, the movies, the plays, the tv shows, the stories, the sci-fi, the translated ancient poems, the fucking millennia of men writing about their self inserts torturing women and it being declared as High Art by other men, we’re supposed to read it in our free time, study it in classrooms, include their styles in our own writing, accept their cultural influence as natural, watch it in the cinema, write about it, talk about it, accept it, aspire it, but men can’t tolerate three seconds of female wish fulfilment of a woman snapping the wrist of a creep without feeling personally kicked in the balls.

[darkshrimpemotions]

This reminds me of something I observed in college while I was doing my honors thesis on women in modern horror films. I watched a LOT of horror during that time as part of my research, and sometimes that was done with my family around.

And my dad and brothers? Were deeply disturbed by the movie Jennifer’s Body. I was flabbergasted. It’s not scary! It’s not even that gory. But they were horrified by it. These men who grew up on 70s slashers were legitimately shook by 90 minutes of Megan Fox eating a few teenage boys, mostly off-screen.

Similarly, my all-male reading panel for my thesis? Were so disturbed by my synopsis of the film Teeth that they couldn’t even talk about it. One of them said he couldn’t look at his wife for a week after reading it.

Again, grown-ass men who study and teach media for a living. Who definitely watch and enjoy horror movies. One of whom was a huge Tarantino buff. We watched and read worse in his intro to mass media class! But one movie about a girl whose vag could bite was enough to haunt him.

Then of course you have things like the Gone Girl backlash–men yelling that Amy Dunne is evil and women clamoring to assure everyone that they know she is not someone to emulate–the backlash against Carol Danvers, and, more recently, the griping from MRAs against the upcoming film Hustlers, which is about strippers scamming their Wall Street clients.

My conclusion? Most men–at least most straight, cisgender men, who are both my sample population and most of the ones whining that Carol is a “villain”–are perfectly fine with, and desensitized to, media where men do violence to women (horror movies), or men do violence to men (horror and action movies). They’re even sort of fine when women do violence to women (“ooooo cat fight!”).

But they get intensely uncomfortable when women are depicted doing any kind of violence to men, especially in films that tilt the balance of power to the other side of the m/f gender binary beyond a single moment or scene.

So woman as flesh-eating monster with men as her preferred cuisine? Woman who responds to unwanted sexual contact by biting it off? Woman who frames her cheating husband for murder? Woman whose response to harassment–behavior that many of the loudest whiners know is both creepy and reflective of their own thoughts/actions–is to break something?

Too scary. Unacceptable. Disturbing. These men hate being presented with the idea, even in fiction, that their position of power is socially constructed, that it could easily be flipped the other way. It terrifies them.

In feeling that terror, they experience a tiny modicum of what living, existing, moving, being perceived as a woman in the world is like.

And they flinch every time.

[tzikeh]

Here have a newspaper comic from 1993

[whenfatecollides]

Xena Warrior Princess 3.18 Fins, Femmes And Gems

[mayflame15]

[violentdevotion]

someone in the UK threw eggs at Charles and was arrested and has been banned from openly carrying eggs in public and has since been sent death threats but their statement on the matter was so fucking good

[0jamajos]

also let's take a moment to appreciate the picture of this man being arrested

[humanoidchaos]

🥚❤

[fez-ryan]

"So my bail conditions were, between my arrest and my trial, were that I wasn't allowed to carry eggs in public." host laughs "Yeah, I know, and so that is in itself like so absurd that it's like right" Host: "I gotta know, is there like a provision for if you're going home from the store? Or are you just, are you just egg-less?" "So the copper who was literally just like making this up at the station says like 'Ok, so your bail condition is: you're not allowed within 500 meters of the king; you're not allowed to carry eggs in public' and then he goes like 'ah actually, like, what 'appens if he wants to buy some eggs?' Ok, so they changed it so it's like, 'You're allowed to carry eggs as long as you're going home from the shops and you've got the receipt" host laughs "And I think, that was more viral than me actually doing it, you know what I mean like, people were like, that's Britain for you, have you got a license for those eggs"

-"The Man Who Egged King Charles", It Could Happen Here, May 18 2023

[eilooxara]

[annabelle--cane]

what I mean: "sexual intercourse" is as much a social construct as "romantic courtship," and you discover this very quickly as a queer person if you try to talk to able bodied straight cis people who literally think the only thing that counts as Actual Sex is penis-in-vagina penetration, like they call oral "foreplay" it's so dire. various people have a lot of vested interest in cleanly defining "sex" vs "not sex" for a whole slew of reasons (ex. censorship dodging and enforcing, conferring the social clout of virginity and prowess, finding and closing loopholes about premarital sex, deciding what relationships "count" as serious partnerships, ligating what is general assault vs sexual assault vs Something That's Definitely Probably Fine And Not Sexual At All, Actually, etc.), and it's really not something you can just fall back on as obvious common sense that people are dumb for questioning.

what I say: sex isn't real and you can't have it

[oceaxe-ifdawn]

What Paul Actually Wrote—And What He Didn't

How we know and why it's important

[mostlysignssomeportents]

The Enshittificator

Digital products and services keep getting worse. In the new report Breaking Free: Pathways to a fair technological future, the Norwegian Consumer Council has delved into enshittification and how to resist it. The report shows how this phenomenon affects both consumers and society at large, but that it is possible to turn the tide. Read more on forbrukerradet.no/breakingfree

[nowiloveblackberry]

I've always wanted to move to Norway...

[mostlysignssomeportents]

[mtf-the-gathering]

"gender is a social construct": fairly easy for leftists to understand

"race is a social construct": a bit harder to swallow for some but still reasonable

"mental illness is a social construct": this one gets you hate mail in your inbox

[thebookewyrme]

Gotta add previous tags on here, because this is gonna live rent free in my head from now on. The stars are real, constellations are not. Damn. Tags by @smoreofbabylon (if you don’t want me to put you on blast like this I’ll delete lol!)

[crabanarchy]

the number one rule of burger photography is the closer you are to the burger, the worse it looks. Extrapolating, the most appetizing burger is the one you cannot see - the implied burger, the burger of your mind

[vikas-room]

[destinationtoast]

[redlipstickresurrected]

Joanna Karpowicz (Polish, b. 1976, Kraków, Poland) - 7AM, Poland, 2024, Paintings: Acrylic on Paper

[thatnordicguy]

I've failed to read rooms I was alone in

[oceaxe-ifdawn]

The Ur-“Conspiracy”: History of a Pseudoconcept by Barrett Brown

February 12, 2026 – “The problem we face involves the degree to which the truth must now compete with such a vast multiplicity of falsehoods

[oceaxe-ifdawn]

Fuckin' Greg, a story in 4 parts

[elodieunderglass]

Concerning (things about) Hobbits: Meeting the Big Man

One of the most important characters in Lord of the Rings is someone you like and trust. You quote him often, remember him fondly, and rely on his word.

You don't know his name. Fanart is nonexistent; there’s no Ao3 tag, no breakout film portrayal, no Amazon money-milking series for this character. You know his voice, have memorised his words; you've probably never read any meta about him.

I'll bet I’m the only person you've seen on Tumblr who really talks about That Fucking Guy, and I hate that man with a cold academic passion. (I also love him. He's my blorbo. He could be yours.)

I think you shouldn't trust him as much as you do.

Here is why.

This book is largely concerned with Hobbits, and from its pages a reader may discover much of their character and a little of their history...

That is the first sentence of The Fellowship of the Ring.

The prologue of the Lord of the Rings is iconic. Swept away by the story, we forget we’re reading at all. It's understandable. Who can resist the overwhelming charm of the writer, and the bewildering excitement of being taken by the hand and invited into The Fellowship of the Ring.

But even people with deeper takes on Tolkien tend to miss the significance of the Prologue. It’s a place where critical reading abilities and political processors usually turn off entirely - fair enough, it's probably a relief. Let's talk about the Narrator.

Meeting the Narrator: Time, Place, Person

The Prologue is narrated by a Mannish (Big Folk) Narrator, a modern human being, from an accessible academic standpoint. We are encouraged to think of him as Friendly Professor Tolkien, although you really do need to remember that he is clearly addressing us from within a fictional narrative world. He is a character. Even if he is Tolkien’s self-insert, intended to be read as Tolkien Himself, he is still a character who can be analysed and interpreted. This is a fictional character.

The Big Man deliberately addresses the reader as someone with a shared background, in what is presumably somewhere in the early-to-mid twentieth century. It is stated multiple times that you (reader) and Narrator are both Big Folk together - there is no chance that you, the Reader, are a scholar of another race.

It is plain indeed that in spite of later estrangement Hobbits are relatives of ours: far nearer to us than Elves, or even than Dwarves.

Pick out the “later estrangement” and park it for now.

The casting of the Narrator is a deliberate alignment with Professor Tolkien, and we are certainly intended to understand him as an academic, avuncular, rather unworldly male professor in the British Isles.

(Sidebar: for convenience I gender the Narrator as male. I think there's evidence for the Narrator being intended as male-by-default, which can be provided on request, and I personally feel the Big Man narrator is the translator/propagator of the silly convention of referring to modern humans as “capital-M Men.” )

The Prologue is written charmingly, a framing device of an academic translator giving the context of background information before presenting someone else’s text (the translated Red Book, etc). Later, this Prologue connects to the Appendices in The Return of the King, where the Narrator returns in his persona of the translator of the works. Our Narrator is certainly a strong, influential, deliberate character, with a specific and distinctive voice!

Anyway, whether or not you choose to picture the Big Man Narrator as Tolkien Himself doing a folksy Bit, OR as a character Tolkien created - Remember! The entire story is fiction and the Big Man Narrator is a created fictional character. Why would you assume he is telling the truth? Why assume that he is an expert? Where are his biases?

Look what the Big Man Narrator actually says. Look at what he chooses to tell, and what he finds unimportant. There are so, so many posts that pick over the fascinating bits of Concerning Hobbits, mining canon for more information, as if it is a pure source of truth. I suggest that the next time you do, you try this fun exercise.

Before we go into the Magic Thing, the narrator also notes AGAIN that hobbits exist today, but are shorter than they were;

They seldom now reach three feet; but they have dwindled, they say, and in ancient days they were taller.

This continues and reinforces the framing of “hobbits still exist now,” and sounds rather as if the Big Man has interviewed modern hobbits (“they say,”) which we’ll also park.

We move on, parking "it's assumed you're a Man, receiving information from a Mannish professor", the "future estrangement" and "diminished hobbits are available for interview."

The Magic Thing

I was provoked into writing this by a fun Tumblr post pointing out that "hobbits are said to 'not study magic' - does that mean that they don't HAVE magic?" which went off into a separate and funnier reblog chain.

I want to analyse this again, noting that this is information received from Big Man.

Let’s examine the “hobbit magic thing” noting that we are being TOLD all of this by a CHARACTER.

Here’s how the passage about "hobbit magic" starts.

Hobbits are an unobtrusive but very ancient people, more numerous formerly than they are today;

In our time, we’ve just been told, hobbits still exist, but had a population drop and are vanishing. To the point where a reader is not expected to have ever heard of them. Chillingly, in typical mid century British academic fashion, the Big Folk Narrator assumes that the reader is also British; when he later mentions that the remaining hobbits only live in the British Isles, it’s a little alarming. There’s a species of humans native to these islands, so rare and so politically silent that you’ve never seen or heard of them.

Hello?!

for they love peace and quiet and good tilled earth: a well-ordered and well-farmed countryside was their favourite haunt.

We are told here that Hobbits are going extinct because they cannot readily survive due to, essentially, habitat destruction. (we feel the Narrator’s annoyance about the Industrial Revolution spoiling the “peace and quiet” strongly here, more strongly than the buried implications for indigenous people).

They no longer have any land. Not only have they lost the Shire, they have no towns, small villages or even farms. “Was” is very much past-tense, and they “haunted” land in the past, ghosting lightly and leaving no traces of their presence, rather than living there. so in our modern day there’s certainly no Shire, no Bree (mixed human/hobbit town) and no Michel Delving, which in its time was a market town with above-ground buildings and a museum. For context, it takes a decent amount of work for the British Isles to lose towns, especially on the level of development that Hobbits had - famously anachronistic, they have waistcoat buttons and watermills and good china and museums and smoking habits, while all the rest of medieval-ish Middle Earth is not as developed.

It’s hard to lose all that, without any trace at all, in crowded countries. Wholesale loss always means that Something Happened.

They do not and did not understand or like machines more complicated than a forge-bellows, a water-mill, or a hand-loom, though they were skilful with tools.

“Do not and did not” is further reinforcement of a still-living people. (I love the “understand or like” thing, which is charming - the implication that hobbits are perfectly capable of UNDERSTANDING machinery in textile factories, but would hate it.)

Something that makes the Big Man nuanced as a character is that he obviously adores hobbits, and studies them because he likes them. The fondness and admiration comes through, even as he is showing his own privilege and bias.

To me, the way this passage about machinery is framed - lumping together those machines as “about the level of technology hobbits are comfortable with” - is something that someone standing post-Enlightenment, probably post-Industrial Revolution, would do. The implication I take from this passage is that this is a modern writer describing the current status of modern hobbits; a mid-century British scholar, a self-insert of Tolkien.

This sense of time matters, because of everything else he says, and the temptation people will have to excuse the Big Man narrator as “a product of his time.” This isn’t a medieval writer looking back on Middle Earth. It’s a highly educated man writing in the 1940s: computers existed, there were several Disney films out, women had the right to vote, and feminist essays were published from Tolkien's own workplace.

Even in ancient days they were, as a rule, shy of ‘the Big Folk’, as they call us,

We then proceed to see, across three books, examples of hobbit behavior in “the ancient days”, which may serve as an example of this shyness. Several different relationship with Big Folk are outlined, in which fairly chirpy hobbits, characterised by their ready emotional availability, cohesion, and incredible abilities to build relationships and form massive political alliances, seem to do well on the strength of that. Hobbit shyness may involve glaring ferociously at Big Folk for a moment, but within a few days they are sitting on your lap, and then it’s all over. With this evidence in our memory, casting a coy “shyness” as the reason for their avoidance of “us” becomes uncomfortable.

and now they avoid us with dismay and are becoming hard to find.

The Narrator is handwaving, in avuncular fashion, why the Reader has never seen a hobbit in their lives, and needs to be lectured, from first principles, on a living indigenous people of the British Isles. Do marinate on it for a moment, though. The tone of a professor or a parent, whimsically explaining to Victorian children why you don’t see the Tooth Fairy - she hides! Teehee.

They avoid us with dismay.

Behind this airy statement, what happened? Massive betrayals, the loss of their land and political power, loss of the conditions they need for their survival, massive loss of their people, and a total breakdown in trust. Humans and hobbits, in the prologue and main story, are shown as natural allies; close kin who understand each other well; humans are shown owing a tremendous amount of their own political influence to hobbits, and even cold/reserved humans end up liking them after a conversation. Hobbits are especially shown for being loyal friends who do not break down under war; noted for retaining cohesion and resisting corruption; who, under unimaginable conditions, will still resist harming or betraying friends.

Hobbits and humans have clearly had some significant breakage of our kinship since the events of the LotR cycle. The Big Man knows this.

Earlier in the essay, when the Big Man told us that “hobbits are closest to (us)” he gave us a lot of additional information, didn’t he? He refers to “later estrangement.” (He also tells us clearly, in that subtext of that sentence, that no hobbit will ever read the book in our hands, no hobbit will ever be addressed as a reader, no hobbit will enter academia, no hobbit will be able to fill in the gaps that the Big Man waves his hand over. Certainly no hobbit scholar contributed to the Big Man’s translation of the Red Book. They’re not just going, they’re functionally GONE. This is what I mean!) Anyway, even the Big Man notes that there was “an estrangement.” Something that has caused them to flee from contact with us in dismay.

whatever happened in that estrangement probably doesn’t reflect well on the Big Folk. A species facing extinction and hiding, dismayed and estranged, from their closest kin, is not having a pleasant time on this earth. Especially when we understand that they’re basically trapped in the crowded and inhospitable British Isles (and still managing to hide from us to the point of the public not being aware of their existence!)

The Big Man Narrator isn’t interested. This is the point where you ought to start wondering about academic bias on the part of the Big Man Narrator. He's fond of hobbits, and has interviewed/met them, but would never treat one as a colleague.

[…]They possessed from the first the art of disappearing swiftly and silently, when large folk whom they do not wish to meet come blundering by; and this art they have developed until to Men it may seem magical.

so hobbits have an inherent ability of being invisible/undetectable, which they still practice today (teehee, that’s why it’s okay that you’ve never spoken to one) and which is pretty damn effective. Effective enough that people in modern times are completely fooled, effective enough that it still counts as “disappearing,” and the elusiveness of hobbits is so perfect as to conceal their existence from the general public. Effective enough that the few adults who DO discuss hobbits could conceivably think it could be magic. The Narrator has probably rolled his eyes over a rival’s paper about “Slipping Into The Shadow-Realm: how hobbits shift space and time to conceal their vital signatures” (Sayers, 1934).

further, they’ve specifically developed this “art” - from what’s implied to be an instinctive/animal ability - to a higher skill, indistinguishable from magic. The “art” is SOMETHING material and quantifiable, if it was innate-and-continually-developed.

But Hobbits have never, in fact, studied magic of any kind,

Here is a point that’s been discussed on tumblr, and it is correct to note that “studied” is doing a lot of work. Especially when contrasted against the previous sentence, with the interesting term “art”. “It isn’t science/magic, it’s an instinctive art”.

To me - remembering that this is intended to be a mid-century British academic speaking to us - it resonates with how romanticism of marginalised cultures was treated by academia, in the generation the Big Man Narrator would’ve studied in - full of romantic, unexamined, politically revealing statements like, “The Celts are skilled in the art of music, but have never properly studied it.”

What I’m saying here is that we should not assume the Big Man is a good judge of the difference between “art” and “study,” especially since the next bit reads:

and their elusiveness is due solely to a professional skill that heredity and practice, and a close friendship with the earth, have rendered inimitable by bigger and clumsier races.

Hobbit invisibility is an “art” through “heredity,” but also a “professional skill” refined through “practice.” It has been “developed” until it is mistaken for “magic,” but against this, we are told that hobbits “have never studied magic of any kind.” In the cleavage point here, we can see the definition of “study” that The Big Man is working with. This definition is possibly what makes something “magic” or not. Have you seen this before?

The point I am making here is that the Big Man is speaking to us from the position of a “coloniser.” There are some worldbuilding implications to unpack from this. One is that the Big Man is speaking from a place where magic can be studied, not even requiring hereditary aptitude (if hobbits were excluded from magic by physiology, This Fuckin Guy would’ve said it) but that it is an academic practice. Hobbits are not just nearly-extinct and terrified out of contact with humans; they are fully excluded from academia (they do not translate or contribute to translations of their histories; they do not study) and if they cannot formalise their practices in acceptable study as the Big Man defines it, it cannot be magic. This is exactly the tone in which majority cultures dismiss other practices of culture/medicine/science, by stating it is NOT a form of science, because it is not practiced with the academy, because it is definitionally not allowed in the academy.

We can then go to a higher level of political analysis and reading, and ask: who benefits from a definition of “magic” that includes (academic study) but excludes (hobbit arts)?

You can certainly do some delightful worldbuilding answers for yourself, and say that “perhaps magic is spells, material changes, great works as performed by Elvish or Maiar Ringbearers, etc.” But if we look at the political stuff I’ve just pointed out, why not examine the definition and who it serves and why? Given that we’ve seen this pattern before - colonisers deliberately bundle, define and dismiss marginalised practices as primitive, animalistic, instinctual and unschooled, as part of the PURPOSEFUL WORK of colonisation - I read the Big Man definition as: “Magic is formalised by the bigger races and defined by excluding the practices of the smallest race.”

Who does this benefit? Well, the Bigger Races could in some ways. Magic must be studied, hobbits don’t study, hobbits don’t have magic, hobbits are The Only Unmagical Humans - despite having practices indistinguishable from magic - this could be something. Big Men would have some reason to define “magic” to exclude hobbits. Normally this is done in order to take resources or drain resistance from marginalised people, but as hobbits have had virtually no remaining resources or resistance since long before the Industrial Revolution, you could open this up to other worldbuilding implications - maybe, Big Men didn’t really MIND hobbits going extinct.

An interesting point here is to re-read sections of this work with different interpretations of who the Big Man is. Where are his biases? Who is he as a character?

I personally read him as a friendly, Tolkienesque academic who likes hobbits, follows his linguistic interests, and is too blinded by his bias to think about their political position. He seems unaware of the horrors he's talking about. Perhaps that's down to innocence.

A character crying out to be analysed.

Landless and Dismayed

That sums up a lot of information that can be mined from one of the very first paragraphs of the Fellowship of the Ring. But here's another message to toy with - hobbits exist in the modern space; landless, estranged, fleeing from us in dismay. Quite likely to have been betrayed.

What happened?