Ok. What you're gonna want to do is chop up a cucumber and put it in a bowl. Then you're gonna sprinkle a generous portion of salt on top. Then you're gonna drizzle them with a balsamic vinaigrette and gently shake to combine, leaving you with a cool and refreshing summer snack. In 15 seconds dangerous and burly men are going to drag me away to an unknown second location. Remember everything I've taught you. I love you
When you're unable to solve an IT problem at work, there really is nothing quite like having it escalated all the way up the ladder. With every step, there is a degree of smugness about how real my problem is, and that yes, I was right to have trouble with this.
You can get a minor version of this if one IT person solves it but they spend a bunch of time repeating things you’ve already tried and when they eventually solve it it’s by doing something you wanted to try but didn’t have the requisite permissions to do
Was in a situation where neither I, nor my boss knew what was causing the problem, so we ended up calling one of the head engineers, and ive never experienced anything quite as validating as the moment where said head engineer, after spending several minutes just staring at the problem, quietly said "what the fuck"
I used to use Google docs, but the white mode only was really annoying me (tires my eyes), so I swapped to Ellipsus (which I genuinely love and recommend), but it was bothering me a bit that I need wifi in order to use it, so now I switched to LibreOffice Writer, which I do like.
It very much has a Microsoft Word feel, but is open source and you need no accounts to use it. It's local on your device, so no AI can scan it, and no wifi is needed.
I still wish it had the Google Docs cards, because, bitch, that thing is so good for easy organizing.
i think one of the best parts about being a teenager in the early to mid 2010s was that cigarettes were definitely not cool anymore and vapes hadn’t popularized yet so my lungs made it out of my peak impressionable years relatively unscathed
WHAT DO U MENA SUMMARY WHAT ELSE MATTERS ITS GAY POC AND ENEMIES TO LOVERS HOW OFTEN DO U CONE ACROSS THAT
i want to know what its about mainly. is it a romance? is there plot besides the romance? is it realistic fiction? sci fi? fantasy? historical? future? alternate history? whats the tone? what are the themes? what are the main characters’ NAMES?
I- it’s gay the gay
i value queer characters too. but i also want to know WHAT THE BOOK I’M READING IS ABOUT.
Mostly, I want to know the tone. A 19th century war story isn’t gonna do it for me when I’m in the mood for a lighthearted austenesque romance - and those are both historical. A star warsy space romp isn’t gonna do it if I want to read about interplanetary political negotiations - and those are both sci fi. A fun gratuitious don’t-think-about-it-too-hard action story is not the same as a dark and complicated mob drama. A suspenseful thriller will bore me if I’m looking for a fast paced spy novel.
not providing a summary literally just shows how you treat marginalized people and their representation as this token woke thing that you can show off like a shiny trophy. no, people aren’t going to read something just because it has representation! that’s not how it works!
The resulting “nanopasta” can then be spun into a tiny mat about 2 centimetres across. While it isn’t intended as food, Clancy says that it should be safe to eat, but is reticent to talk about having tried it. “It’s an ethical quandary to talk about scientific self-experimentation,” he says. “But, hypothetically, one might expect it to be chewier than you’d expect.”
I really don’t want to open this can of worms because Tumblr hath no fury like people called out on their political performativeness but it is literally driving me up the wall to watch people react to Serkis’ ‘keep Tolkien white’ commentary by insisting twice as hard that Tolkien would descend down to earth and dropkick the entire Republican party to hell or whatever, just because they want to ensure that a piece of media they enjoy isn’t seen as being morally impure. Case in point: I have seen at least five instances of Tolkien’s ‘I hate apartheid’ valedictorian address being used as a ‘counter’ to Serkis being racist, including by actual news outlets.
Except it’s only ever the ‘I hate apartheid’ line that’s shared, and not the actual quote in its full context. Because here it is:
If we consider what Merton College and what the Oxford School of English owes to the Antipodes, to the Southern Hemisphere, especially to scholars born in Australia and New Zealand, it may well be felt that it is only just that one of them should now ascend an Oxford chair of English. Indeed it may be thought that justice has been delayed since 1925. There are of course other lands under the Southern Cross. I was born in one; though I do not claim to be the most learned of those who have come hither from the far end of the Dark Continent. But I have the hatred of apartheid in my bones; and most of all I detest the segregation or separation of Language and Literature. I do not care which of them you think White.
Which is to say. This isn’t exactly the antiracist quote of the century, to say the least. This is a white South Africa born man and a white Australian shaking hands and going ‘omg we relate’ and expressing what is a very, very mild ‘segregation is not great’ opinion in order to convey his thoughts on an academic subject, ie the confluence of language and literature. Using race to make a point about his own subject of interest, in his own interest, which is, amusingly enough, what a lot of ostensibly well meaning progressive seem to be doing.
I also think that some of the general surprise around ‘what do you mean large swathes of the Tolkien fandom are incredibly conservative!?’ in lib/left Tolkien fandom is the result of a tendency in said parts of the fandom to transpose one’s own progressiveness onto Tolkien and turn a blind eye to things like, say, the Shire being a very specifically mid-century British racist construct that is very, very clear in its politics, often going so far as to insist it’s anarchist or an ideal society or whatever the fuck… and then getting really Pikachu-meme ‘but they’re misreading it’ every single time a conservative explains exactly what it is about the legendarium that they really love, and get surprised when someone uses the Shire being a racist construct to do more racism. It is 2026 let us do away with ‘I don’t see colour’ interpretations of media, I beg. Nobody is cancelling you for enjoying a book that is not kind to race. Most of the books I love are not kind to race.
I genuinely don’t have the energy to go deeper into it now because I and others have been beating this drum for ages but like man. Man. I’m not surprised by Serkis’ comment. I don’t really give a shit about what Andy Serkis says and does because if I was the kind of person who gave a fuck about Andy ‘I felt like an ethnic minority on the Black Panther set’ ‘I somehow interpreted Animal Farm in the most ridiculous way possible’ Serkis’ opinions on anything, let alone race, my life would be much sadder. I think the adaptation will be an enshittified money-grab, and I will probably embrace cannibalism when McDonalds inevitably starts giving out little Gollums with every Happy Meal. Again.
What I am surprised and disappointed by is how the liberal-left reaction to this shit is to always and forever just either pretend it doesn’t exist in the text, or is the result of a complete misreading. So seldom is the response ‘fuck me, this book has some real wild thoughts on race, let’s see how we can engage creatively with that in an adaptation’. Which has never happened. In fact, all your thoughts on Amazon and lore faithfulness and other adaption criticism or applause aside, TROP, the only Tolkien interpretation that has directly engaged with race has thus far done so very, very badly, and only on a surface level. Why?
Because the loudest parts of liberal Tolkien fandom is not interested in exploring race as it exists in the text, to explore it progressively, to engage creatively with the structural conservatism present within the very construction of Middle Earth. They’re interested in concessions that change very little: you can have your brown elves, as long as we don’t have to think about the implications of foundational aspects of our beloved world, which we relate to greatly and do not wish to think about why we relate to it beyond our own experience of encountering the text.
No, it’s always either an insistence that the Racists are Wrong because the Text is Pure, or a slight, grudging concession that Tolkien had ‘a few racist elements’ but ‘nothing like the racism of today’. Of course it’s nothing like the racism of today. Tolkien isn’t writing in 2026. It was the racism of yesterday, and it is very clearly written into the text. Tolkien is not your mildly problematic grandpa. Tolkien was an Oxford don with an enormous, wide-ranging cultural impact, and refusing to acknowledge that is the misreading, not the pointing out of or engagement with structural racism within the text.
There's also a version of this where people cite Tolkien's 1938 letter to the German publisher, ie the one where he refuses to confirm he's of "Aryan" descent and basically tells them to fuck off, as the other canonical "proof text" that Tolkien Was Not Racist, and it does the same flattening as the valedictorian quote. It's a great letter, very ‘get thee gone from my gate’ but it is also a letter about refusing a specific, legally coded Nazi racial category, not a statement about the internal racial logic of his own fiction.
Nobody is saying Tolkien was a fascist white supremacist Nazi. Hell, Tolkien’s own thoughts on military atrocity in general is pretty clear in the depictions of the escalating kinslayings. But people love to conflate "hated actual fascism, said so on the record and is very evident in his fiction" with "therefore the legendarium contains no racialised hierarchy," as though those two things have to rise or fall together, when they don't. You can be sincerely, personally opposed to Nazi race science and apartheid violence and still write a mythology where moral and aesthetic worth consistently map onto a Northern-European somatic ideal. Because the racialisation Tolkien both inherited and passed on wasn't Nazi race science, it was the broader Edwardian/interwar philological raciology he was actually swimming in, hell, drowning in, considering the Oxford environment. And I find it so, so frustrating how fandom keeps failing to make this distinction: structural racialisation and personal bigotry are not the same axis, and refusing to be measured on one doesn't clear you on the other.
The Southrons/Easterlings material is obviously the part most quoted when it comes to Tolkien’s ‘problematic elements’ except it's imo super telling how rarely it actually gets quoted compared to how often it gets vaguely waved at (except Charles E Mills. I love you Charles E Mills). Anyway “Black men like half-trolls," swarthy, slant-eyed, riding out of the south and east to serve Sauron… it’s the same mapping of good-north/evil-south-and-east you get in a dozen other early-twentieth-century adventure texts. And this imo actually undermines the "it's just medievalism, calm down" defense, because medievalism is a selectively retrospective construction of which past you're claiming and which one you're othering, not some sort of static, neutral historical styling.
Tolkien's medievalism is specifically Northern European heroic-elegiac medievalism, the "Northernness" he talks about loving as a kid, and that aesthetic preference is not extractable from the racial hierarchy it produces on the page. You cannot keep the aesthetic and disclaim the politics because as in all art, the aesthetic is the politics, that's what "structural" means as opposed to "incidental”, and I just wish that many extremely clever people who understand this in a contemporary sense would allow themselves to feel uncomfortable and look at it in a beloved text.
Jackson's trilogy didn't invent racialisation in Tolkien, hell I think he even softened some of it because the Scouring is straight up impossible to adapt without it being very clear about its politics, but his adaptation does go quite some way make the existing racism legible… casting, costuming, choreography and cinematography does the same racialised sorting the text does, and does it visually: Uruk-hai as a kind of grunting brutalised, brutalistic mass, Haradrim on oliphaunts as a fairly straightforward Orientalist boogeyman, and the Fellowship itself photographed like a Pre-Raphaelite fantasy lmfao. Serkis isn't introducing a new interpretive layer with his commentary, hell Serkis was in all those Jackson films as well! Serkis is being very clear about what aspects of the legendarium matter to him, and that aspect happens to be the whiteness of it all. And I genuinely cannot understand why the huge ‘scandal’ around his comment is not that someone said the quiet part, but that saying it out loud is what became the scandal, taken as some kind of transgression against Tolkien and all his readers with Good Politics™️, rather than the quarter-century of adaptations, readings, and analysis of the text that wordlessly encoded the racism and got called faithful and dedicated for it.
I didn’t want to go to author is dead territory but. Fandom discourse keeps reaching for authorial intent as the arbiter of textual meaning in exactly the way most of these same people would reject in any other context. Everyone is a massive New Critic the second the author in question is someone they love. But Tolkien doesn’t need to have consciously intended a racial hierarchy or a white nationalist mythology for the text to functionally produce one, for it to be so loved by conservatives and ethnonationalists who come fifty years after his time.
Intent is not even a contested position in literary theory, it's just the very basic understanding that "text has ideology independent of authorial intent". The insistence on relitigating Tolkien's personal feelings as though that settles the structural question is wild to me, and I find it so extremely unproductive how liberal fandom reaches for this constantly, repeatedly chanting Tolkien’s few vaguely liberal statements that read far less liberally in context. But I guess the alternative, ie reading the actual construction of race in the legendarium on its own terms, requires giving up the fantasy that the thing you love is politically inert. And it’s just so sad man. Like I fucking love the legendarium, and I think insisting on its moral purity is the worst thing you can do to it.
I think my entire argument can be summed up in a few questions. Why do conservatives keep saying "I love Tolkien" completely unashamedly, in a way they don’t realy say about most other ‘canonical’ twentieth-century texts, while we on the left have to perform a whole apologetic dance before we say it? What is it that they embrace about the text, that we have to occlude in order to express an unproblematic ‘love’? Why do we have to disavow parts of a text to claim we love it? Who are we performing to? What are we losing in focusing so hard on this performance?
This is why the Serkis-style comment, or the Rings of Power casting discourse, ends up being the deepest engagement we collectively get in fandom terms. Because both "sides" of that fight are actually shallow in the same way, just from opposite ends. The right-wing backlash to diverse casting is, repulsively, responding to something absolutely present in the text: a defensive crouch around a racial aesthetic it identifies as being under threat. The liberal-left response, the "just add brown elves" gesture, claims the problem to be one of representation and casting rather than structure, which is precisely why the racial elements of The Rings of Power satisfies no one and changes nothing.
You can put actors of colour in Númenor and Harfoot villages and yet the underlying moral framework of who is coded as inherently noble and who as inherently monstrous, whose skin colour the textual narrative uses as a standin for corruption, stays completely untouched. Again, see my TROP link above, with the jihadi-coding of the villains. Because that framework isn't located in the casting of an adaptation, it's located in the construction of Arda itself and physiognomy-as-morality at the level of the prose itself, constantly present throughout the text. Casting a Black actor as an elf doesn't do anything to the fact that "evil race coded as racially other" is still sitting right there in the Southrons and the orcs, unadapted, undiscussed, doing exactly the same work it always did, and this work takes on a new look in post-2001 adaptations.
So what you get is two adaptations of the same tiresome insanemaking discourse rather than two different arguments: the right defends the racial aesthetic as the substance of their love, and the liberal mainstream defends the fantasy that representation-level tweaks constitute engagement with race. And so, nobody actually produces the adaptation that takes seriously what nonwhite Tolkien scholars have been saying for decades, which is that you'd have to touch the orc/Southron/Valar/Valinor/blondeness architecture itself to ever productively have this conversation. Not diversify who plays the good guys, but interrogate why "evil" in this legendarium has a face and a hair colour and points compass east.
But if the talk about this goes on as it does, and continues between Tolkien the Pure versus Tolkien the Misread, there will never be anyone willing to make that adaptation, and we’ll go on forever in a sisyphean climb, where both the reactionary embrace and the progressive denial are just two versions of refusing to read the same damn book. Basically, I think we on the left etc need to stop treating "is Tolkien racist" as a yes/no gate you have to clear before you're allowed to enjoy the books, and stop acting like enjoying problematic media makes you a fascist. We need to start treating the racialised architecture within Tolkien’s world as the actual object of study, same way you'd read imperial romance or Forster or Kipling or Haggard, without needing to acquit or convict the author first.
Which means we have to name the conservatism specifically rather than gesturing at "some outdated attitudes," trace where it comes from historically (the philological Northernness Tolkien grew up steeped in, not some special personal failing that reflects badly on you), and then ask what an adaptation would look like which dramatised that rather than smoothing over it or weaponising it. We have to let go of the idea that critical engagement is disloyalty, and let go of the idea that loving something requires defending its honour. We need to get the resilience needed to engage with the idea that a work can be both formative and ideologically compromised at the same time.
We don’t need to resolve that tension into either adoring hagiography or totalising cancellation. If we do, we're going to keep getting “keep the Shire white” Serkis soundbites and “hooray we cast a brown elf in our we-invented-elf-jihadis show!” news cycles standing in for a conversation that hasn't actually started yet, and ngl buddies I have to say I personally will be biting people the next time I see yet another rendition of the same damn response-reaction cycle start again because everyone, both the conservatives and the left, wants the things they love to be a reflection of themselves, and will twist themselves into pretzels to ensure that remains the case.
what if crystals actually did have magical properties for elves. could feanor have been cured simply by meditating with some rose quartz and focusing on the healing vibrations from the crystal?
what if when feanor made the silmarills, he inadvertently invented the most spicy of all the crystals: enriched uranium. which is why everyone who spent time in close proximity to those stupid rocks suddenly lost 97% of their braincells.
the description of thingol’s crown changes over the course of the lay of leithian (‘silver grey’ ‘gold […] with ruby red and crystal clear’ ‘green and silver’) (also in book of lost tales ‘a wreath of scarlet leaves’) -> revisions and inconsistencies across drafts -> wrong. he had multiple crowns because he was a fashionista
You can probably tell how much fun I had with this commission, ie Elrond and Elros as described and commissioned by the wonderful @mnimeresponding, who back in December requested them depicted as identical twins at different ages, some point early in the Second Age, where Elros has aged quite far ahead. And I was incredibly compelled by that idea and wanted to do a bright, smiling ‘courtly’ portrait representing a circumstance, ie identical twins where one has aged and one is frozen in time, that is a tragic concept both in real life and in this context. Endurance! The long defeat! Ever onwards at all cost! Ever onwards, but at what cost!?
It was such an interesting challenge to work on and tested my portraiture skills, as showing ‘identicality’ represented across the aesthetics of two diverging ‘races’ and societies, not to mention ages… More design notes re jewelry styles under the cut if you’re keen, or you can just enjoy the art (and thank @mnimeresponding for the excellent concept)!
GALLERY AND COMMISSIONS | KOFI
I wanted Elrond to have very fancy elven earrings while making Elros, who by this point would have been 2-300 years into his rule, a little more staid and mannish (in both senses of the word lol) in his jewellery, but also I added little piercing holes in Elros’ ears matching the ones in Elrond’s, gesturing to his elven upbringing.
The hardest part obviously was conveying the fact that they’re identical twins when they have such different ages and hair/facial hair. Normally when my works have multiple people in them I work on them one by one, but just to keep myself on my toes with the likenesses, I worked on each feature in tandem… so they have the same eyes, noses, matching dimples (🥺) similar colouring, yet distinct to their different lives and ages, so Elros’ skin being more ‘weather beaten’, his laugh lines are much deeper, his nose spreads out more because he’s grinning, and of course, he’s aged quite a bit by this point (which is probably why Elrond’s laugh lines aren’t as deep...)
I envision both of them as having that cute little snaggletooth (putting the fear of god in Maglor and Maedhros because I know full well that neither of them have experienced the concept of baby teeth —> adult teeth, let alone a snaggletooth) only that Elrond is a bit too miserable to grin that wide these days. But it’s there! Also thank you to all the art buddies who encouraged me with teeth, they are my biggest challenge…
Both of them have a similar and rather unfashionable looking blue stone worn in different ways… idk if you can see it since Tumblr compresses quality so hard, but they each have a little swan in flight on the stone 🥺❤️🦢 because I just could not resist.
Silmarillion being published in 1977 must mean there was some nerdy teenager out there who's modern AU consisted of Fingon wearing a crop top that's basically just the cut top half of a normal shirt or Feanor in a full red velvet suit or Celegorm traveling in a van with a giant wolf or something painted over it and they're the only person that's ever been right about anything
An illustration style rendition of Turgon for @ignotr, as commissioned in February by @the-other-side-of-mirkwood 🥰 I really enjoyed hyperfixating on this one, especially with the embroidery and general white roses theme, his relative… er, turgidity, and everyone knows I love a good grey streak. Prosthetic fingers from the Helcaraxë years as well! Also @peasant-player pattern making a reappearance on his sash 🥰
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