One Nice Bug Per Day
sheepfilms
@theartofmadeline
taylor price
PUT YOUR BEARD IN MY MOUTH
Game of Thrones Daily
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AnasAbdin
Not today Justin
ojovivo
Misplaced Lens Cap
Sweet Seals For You, Always
Kaledo Art
Love Begins
Discoholic 🪩
#extradirty
2025 on Tumblr: Trends That Defined the Year
I'd rather be in outer space 🛸
Kiana Khansmith
Sade Olutola
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@piruett-se
Too many settings where "all myth and folklore are true". Welcome to my setting where no myths and folklore are true. Cola and Mentos don't do anything. No plants have any properties. No-one's ever had anything funny or interesting happen to them even once in all of human history.
"That sounds like a good idea......."-"Is there something bothering you with the idea?"-"No, the idea is GOOD.....🙂"
Can someone explain this to me?
Old people use quotation marks to indicate emphasis, as a substitute for italics (which many of them could not produce on the old typewriters they learned to write on), whereas young people use them to indicate sarcasm or falseness. They’re used as “scare quotes”.
And old people use ellipses simply to indicate a pause, or for some other incomprehensible reason I’m not aware of. But young people use ellipses to indicate passive-aggression.
So an old person could type something like:
how are things going with your “boyfriend”….
and what they mean is
How are things going with your boyfriend? [Im so excited for you, sweetie, and I wanna hear about it]
But a young person would interpret that sentence as
How are things going with your so-called boyfriend…. [I say, while seething with contempt for him and possibly for you too]
The linguistic difference across generations is beautifully explained here thank you
Illustration from The Cat Who Went to Sea by Kathryn and Byron Jackson, pictures by Aurelius Battaglia. 1950.
Flame of Udûn by Weirling
Can everyone who reads this PLEASE reblog it?!?!? Libraries literally saved my life as a child!
Being abused at home, bullied at school and lost in the world, the library and all the books I could escape to the most amazing worlds, kept me alive!
I would walk to the library, and spend all day, from 10 am to 9 pm reading there!! I got special awards for how many books I read, I wrote little blurbs on why i loved the books (probably why I love to BETA and do ARCs)
PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE Just hit the green arrows and the reblog!!!
As a 50 year old woman, the library offers me so much. Digital art pads to borrow, 3D printing, book clubs that are face to face (yeah, the introvert likes face to face because a moderator will stomp on anyone getting snarky)
New books in LARGE PRINT! I’m visually challenged and as much as I love my kindle, The feel of a real book in my hands will always be a beloved feeling!
Our library also has quarterly books sales of almost free books!! For 5$USD we get in a day early and can buy as many as we want. Anyone else has to wait and there is a limit for the first 2 days.
Also many, many libraries have inter library loan(it may be called something different). This means if they don’t have the item you want, they can get it for you. This may include photocopy/pdf of articles. This can also include along with books and DVDs, microfilm/fiche which is also a huge resource. Check around for libraries that are listed as depositories if you want to look at government documents.
Remember that many colleges and universities have open stacks for the public. You will likely have to pay a membership fee but you will get to stuff.
I love the library ☺
The library was one of my favorite places to go as a kid and I still live to go and just. Sit and read. Or do homework. The university I’m at has a massive 8-story one I love to just wonder around in~ Great places
Libraries are amazing places, we need to protect them to ensure their continued existence.
I used to wander about the fiction section in my local library, and choose books with the most interesting titles - I discovered two amazing authors that way
If you feel disconnected from your local community & want to find ways to get involved, seriously consider spending some time at the library. Go to some events! Organize a reading group!
Support your libraries!
Read banned books!
People who don’t learn can be more easily controlled and told what to think!
I kind of want to see a goose scream at a Ringwraith now...
Nils Holgersson vs The Witch King
(Context, credit, and source below poll.)
Why do the Ringwraiths/Nazgûl become so much more powerful over the course of the Lord of the Rings trilogy?
Their power depends on how physically close they are to Sauron/Mordor
Didn't think it worth unleashing full power just to deal with some hobbits
Not much to do since conquering Minas Ithil 940 yrs ago so in low-power mode
Their power just waxes & wanes sometimes ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Ringwraiths are specifically weak to hobbits
Power depends on their mounts; Nazgûl-birds = VERY powerful, horses not so much
Out of a sense of fairness, they only level up when the heroes do
As Sauron gains more power, he shares more power with his minions
The Shire exerts an extreme dampening effect on magical powers
Unreliable narrator(s); Bilbo couldn't resist chronicling a slapstick chase
Ringwraiths wanted to avoid incurring the wrath of the Dúnedain (Rangers)
something something Tom Bombadil
Today's poll is based on this thread with notable principles @penny-anna, @elodieunderglass, @elanorpam, and @earhartsease. All of the options above are paraphrased from their original answers.
The full original question:
Can I please ask for your top five theories on why the Ringwraiths become so much more powerful over the course of the LotR trilogy? By the end of the books a single Ringwraith holds an army of 6000 men in paralysing dread from a height of a mile, they're dismaying hosts of men, etc. And in the beginning, they're easily defeated by "jumping behind a tree," "pretending to be in a different room," "getting on a little boat," "man with a stick on fire," etc.
My theory is it’s because they’re fairy tale villains in the first half of Fellowship and epic villains in ROTK. The books practically change genre after Rivendell
That’s the unreliable narrators answer! I’m personally quite fond of it. We note that Bilbo wrote The Hobbit, and had started work on the first part of the Fellowship when the delegates convene. He then passes the torch on to Frodo, noting that his (Bilbo’s) own story is going to have a happy ending. From there, Frodo wrote the rest - his journey, picked up and written after encountering Bilbo in Rivendell - in his own tone. Bilbo’s experiences, writing style, narrative voice/character sense/self-awareness, translation priorities, sense of humour, and deep appreciation for the absurd - all mean that his works are characterised by a narrative lightheartedness - Bilbo is clearly more of a children’s book author. Scenes that would have an average writer biting their pencil in half are breezily dismissed in a comfortably bloodless fashion, all while making fun of himself, and you can imagine him narrating them to the children at the fireside, with lots of rhyming passages (a mark of an oral storyteller or someone experienced with children! All you have to do is get to the repetitive rhyming part and it’s like hitting a save point for your memory! You can tell whole chapters of story seamlessly, out loud, all night this way.) Bilbo is in the business of happy endings; writing, poetry and storytelling were his calling, and his pride. He enjoyed them.
Frodo’s work is diligent and serious. He also fights trolls and intelligent spiders, but he didn’t really want to. When he writes about enemies, it’s with horror and discomfort. He never particularly dreamed of being an author. He just chalks down a historical record - mostly, it seems, because Bilbo wanted it.
Thus, There and Back Again and the first part of The Red Book of the Westmarch are Bilbo’s memoirs, and Ringwraiths come across as just spooky in his writing. The later parts of the Red Book are Frodo writing his own nightmares with a thousand-yard stare about the terrors that permanently disabled him - and the Ringwraiths appear to change but are simply described in a tonal shift.
It’s a good theory! You should vote for it
My theory is that their power level depends on how much Sauron is feeding into them, and their behavior shifts based on how much power they have access to.
Sauron's only just gotten back on the horse, as it were, in the past hundred years. Prior to that he was on the downlow to the point that his shenanigans were mistaken for a mortal necromancer's until Gandalf was like, "Oh, dip." during the Hobbit.
Now he's dealing with Gondor, he's dealing with Rohan, he's trying to manage every orc and troll in the realm who have previously been left to more or less self-govern and probably aren't all in on the Age of the Orc if it means they've got three extra tiers of bossman telling them what to do. Smaug's dead-dead, so that's going to be a fair amount of jockeying around the edge of territory nobody previously wanted to fight a dragon over. The dwarves are on the move, and their political alliances are undergoing a massive shift. The elves are on the move, the eagles are on the move, etc. Fucking Saruman's building his own goddamned Russian front for Mordor's Germany.
There are a lot of irons in that particular fire, is what I'm saying. The Nazgul have been sent to retrieve something very important, yes, but from a fucking gentleman farmer in Fantasyland's version of Bumfuck, Nowhere.
Sending them out looking like they're about to terrorize Gondor into submission is going to draw a lot of attention, which would open yet another goddamned front for Sauron to deal with, as well as point everyone who wasn't previously on the alert for the Ring in its direction. Sending them out in full Kings of Men mode is also probably risking an internal challenge that Sauron absolutely cannot afford with all the other shit going on.
Like, is Sauron its master? Yes. Does Sauron need to deal with the fucking Witch-king getting his hands on the Ring along with his own ring while Sauron is trying to deal with Gandalf and Isengard? No. Plus it's not like they can be killed by an external force, no matter how nerfed he leaves them. The flood that takes them off their mounts is a temporary inconvenience, from Sauron's perspective.
So there aren't many drawbacks to throttling them down, and if it weren't for Gandalf getting wind of something being up and the hobbits having an experienced escort on the way to Elrond's, it absolutely would have worked.
Once they're back at their day job, there's no reason not to have the taps open full-blast, so they're back to being PTSD-machines.
Plus like... at what point in the entire history of the rings have these guys, separately or as a group, as mortals or wraiths, ever been sent out to find Some Dude? Not an elf-lord, or a warrior king in exile, or a wizard, or a goblin king who's been pretending he never got Sauron's letters requisitioning troops. Legit just Some Fucking Dude, who's so deep in Some Fucking Dude mode that he's like, "lol The Horrors are after me? Guess I'll just fucking walk to Rivendell. On the road. With my feet." The response to The Horrors being a lot closer than he thought was like "Guess I'll cut through this dude's fields!"
This is comically outside their skillset. This is outside their boss's skillset. They don't have their own henchmen to ask for advice. They're basically milling around at a crossroad crabbily smoking pipeweed while the Witch-king is furiously texting Sauron like "This isn't working, can we just nuke them?" and getting back "NO YOU CANNOT JUST NUKE THEM." "Okay, how the fuck are we supposed to do this without nuking them?" "JUST FUCKING FIND THEM I DON'T CARE." "There are elves. :( :( :(" "DEFINITELY DO NOT NUKE THEM OR YOU WILL GET GANDALFS. >:|"
"That Tom Bombadil asshole showed up." "DOES TOM BOMBADIL HAVE MY RING." "No." "THEN WHY AM I HEARING ABOUT TOM BOMBADIL."
"We need more money to bribe people and hire spies." "WHAT HAPPENED TO THE MONEY I GAVE YOU." "The price of bribes and spies has really gone up in the past 500 years, and everyone charges ten percent more when they see they're getting paid in cursed grave goods. Or we could just, you know..." "NO NUKING THEM." ":("
"Now there's a Ranger." "YOU BROUGHT ARNOR TO ITS KNEES." "I had a map to Arnor. And an army. And a budget." "DO YOU WANT TO BE WALKING HOME." "Okay, no, fine. It's not a problem."
"We almost had them." "IS THIS HORSE SHOES OR PERHAPS HAND GRENADES." "I'm just saying. I stabbed the one with your Ring. He's got maybe three days before he's a wraith himself. One way or another, we've got this in the bag." "JUST GET IT DONE."
"So, there were more elves." "ARE YOU TRYING TO TELL ME THAT YOU STILL DO NOT HAVE MY RING." "I'm telling you that we need to revise our timeline a little bit. And that we need a new batch of horses." "YOU DO NOT HAVE MY RING AND ALSO YOU DO NOT HAVE MY HORSES." "We can still pull out a win here." "DO YOU THINK I AM MADE OF HORSES." "Is this a trick question? Are you? Do you have a physical form again?" "JUST GET BACK HERE." "The horses drowned? Because of the elves?" "THEN WALK." ":("
Splendidly written. I also throw my hat into the ring for this take: “Ringwraiths are not skilled outside of their immediate job description, and lack professional initiative.”
OR perhaps they have both skill sets and initiative, but they feel that their union doesn’t support them going too far beyond their specific job description; so that even though they could have solved some of their immediate problems by interrogating Fredegar, or could even have laid a little bitty bit of the Black Breath on Farmer Maggot’s barking dog, they absolutely would not. Interrogation (5B) and Cruelty to Animals (605-3) are not in their contract negotiations, and if Sauron wants them to take on additional responsibilities, that’s a different conversation. They only agreed to take on this project because it aligned with their top-level objective of “Being A Menace to Society (1C) and furthermore allowed them to use their competencies in “Spreading Dread and Fear (35X)” which were being under-utilised in the current working environment, leading to low morale. One of the younger Ringwraiths did want to show some more personal initiative, to be seen as more management-track, but the others squashed this, as the most important thing to learn to manage are expectations.
Nytt avsnitt av LÄS HÅRT, en podcast om rymdskepp, vampyrer, zombies, femme fataler, monster, cowboys, trollkarlar, ninjor, galna vetenskapsmän, intriger vid franska hovet, käcka pojk-sidekicks, tidsresor och flickreportrar med skinn på näsan. https://lashart.podbean.com/e/vem-ar-monstret/
I det här avsnittet läser Johan Wanloo och Magnus Dahl en novell av Isabel Cañas som heter "There Are No Monsters on Rancho Buenavista". Kao
I can’t stop laughing at this 🤣😂🤣
It's the capital letter shouting that I love so much.
The gun is cocked. I'm sobbing and shaking.
"Say it."
"I can't!"
They push the gun into my temple. "Say it now."
"ACAB includes Sam Vimes, OK, are you happy now?"
You're lying to yourself if you don't think Samuel Vimes is holding the gun.
the hot new trend is "guard posting"
On your macmillan website it lists various retailers that sell your books. I'm very interested in getting some, and was wondering which one I should purchase from to put the most money in your pocket. If they're all the same, would it be helpful to order it from my local independent book store so more people see your books?
Absolutely order from your local indie book store if you have the option! The difference in the amount of money I get from any given method of purchase is negligible, but it makes a big difference to them, and independent book stores are awesome.
If you read ebooks, it’s honestly entirely up to you what method you want to use—do whatever works best for you, I’d rather you have the book and be able to read it. Preordering and leaving reviews are actually a way bigger help than going through any one specific platform.
JUST IN CASE there’s anyone seeing this funny picture who doesn’t fully understand why this is a terrible idea a circuit breaker is a safety device. It’s designed to shut off a given circuit in the event of an overload. If you stop it from doing its job, you could set your house on fire. Even if that doesn’t happen, you can also cause really expensive damage to your house’s electrical system.
Most houses (and other residential units) will have outlets on several different circuits. (Major appliances, like the stove and refrigerator, usually get their own.) If you have a breaker that keeps tripping, look around for an outlet that still works when that breaker trips, and plug some of your stuff in there instead. (There may even be a helpful diagram inside of the door of your breaker panel--most of the places I’ve lived, it was either left blank or completely illegible, but it’s worth checking.) The idea is to spread the load out over multiple circuits.
TIL the function of a circuit breaker isn't common knowledge
What the hell else do people think they're for?
Remember that there’s at least a whole generation of people who were raised without any serious education on how to maintain homes or personal property by their parents or schools
They turn off on their own?!?!?!?!?!
It's so distressing that so many people, through no fault of their own, don't have this kind of home maintenance knowledge. Circuit breakers are an update on the fuse, which had a similar function. Fuses have to be replaced after they blow (if you've seen the "putting up the tree" bit from A Christmas Story, that's why the dad is going to the fusebox with a flashlight). Circuit breakers can be reset once the electrical load has been redistributed. As noted upthread, the door of your breaker panel will sometimes have a list of what each circuit breaker corresponds to (e.g., "1: Oven, 2: Upstairs bathroom"). If yours doesn't, it's well worth the time to create one. That makes it much easier to figure out which circuit might be overloading, plus you can quickly kill the electricity to a circuit in case of emergency. Another home tip: Your air conditioner, furnace, and air vents have filters. They need to be changed occasionally.
Found these in my communal laundry room today.
2023 Anticipated Book Releases
Here are my anticipated releases for the first half of 2023. Release dates may be subject to change.
-Hell Bent (Alex Stern #2) by Lehigh Bardugo, Jan 10th. Paranormal Urban fantasy, dark academia, occult
-Emily Wilde's Encyclopedia of Faeries by Heather Fawcett, Jan 10th. Academic faerie folklore, love, friendships, small English towns
-The Last Tale of the Flower Bride by Roshani Chokshi, Feb 14th. gothic, fairytales, myths, marriage secrets
-A Day of Fallen Night (Roots of Chaos #0) by Samatha Shannon, Feb 28th. The long anticipated prequel to The Priory of the Orange Tree.
-The Adventures of Amina Al-Sirafi by Shannon Chakraborty, March 2nd. Retired Lady pirates, medieval middle east, new adventure
-The Mimicking of Known Success by Malka Ann Older, March 7th. Sapphic sci-fi, cozy mystery, missing person, set on Jupiter
-The Foxglove King by Hannah Whitten, March 7th. fantasy, necromancy, court-politics, romance
-Rose/House by Arkady Martine, March 2023. Novella, artificial intelligence, architects, noe-noir science fiction.
-The Scourge between Stars by Ness Brown, April 4th. Sci-fi horror, doomed generation ship, interstellar survival.
-Some Desperate Glory by Emilly Tesh, April 11th. Queer Space opera, avenging earth, warriors, found family
-Untethered Sky by Fonda Lee, April 11th. Novella, Fantasy about a young Roc rider and the hunt for a manticore.
-The Isle of the Gods by Amie Kaufman, May 2nd. Fantasy, high seas adventure, rituals, a spoiled prince
-The Book that Wouldn't Burn by Mark Lawrence, May 9th. SSF, book about books and libraries.
-The Will of the Many by James islington, May 23rd. Roman empire inspired fantasy, military/magic academy, hidden identities
-Witch King by Martha Wells, May 23rd. Demons, and magic and humor. This seems like it will be a good time.
-Garden of the Cursed by Katy Rose Pool, June 20th. Ya fantasy, cursebreaker-for-hire, fake dating, intrigue.
