Spidermonkey @spidermonkey111 - Tumblr Blog

i finished the tenant of wildfell hall today.

(this novel was first published in 1848, so i will not be tagging for spoilers. i think 178 years is plenty of time to either read it or get a sparknotes summary.)

i am not ok, but in the absolute best way. i was honestly delighted by how quickly and easily i fell in love with the story, especially because i was not expecting to. it's been awhile since i couldn't put a book down, and i had to force myself to go to bed last night because i was literally falling asleep sitting up as i was trying to read, and unwilling to capitulate. i had to know what happened next!

one of the aspects of this story i love best is that although the cruelty of huntingdon is shocking and horrible, even if you realise it's coming, it is, compared to a lot of other gothic fiction, a mundane horror. people like arthur huntingdon existed then, and they certainly exist today. the danger brontë describes is still (unfortunately) too important not to discuss. i was sitting there in utter terror, screaming in my head OMG NO SHE THINKS SHE CAN FIX HIM and if i'd had a physical book, i would have been clutching the edges so hard my fingertips would have been white.

it's interesting to me how brontë drew both the characters of helen and huntingdon, because each in their own way is an extreme that i don't think is very common—though definitely not impossible—and both are because so many people of the period required helen to be nearly a living saint and huntingdon to essentially be the devil himself for people to sympathise with her. and i'm willing to bet even then, there were those who still thought she should have stayed. they were wrong, helen should have stabbed him in the eye, but i guess not everyone is circumspect enough to see that.

and gilbert. oh, gilbert. one of his greatest strengths is that, in all honesty, he's just some guy. he's a member of the gentry, yes, but not an especially high-born one, he doesn't have any illustrious connections, his dad didn't seem to have a deleterious effect on his principles, he participates in the labour of his farm. he even seems to have developed the foundation of some of these principles despite his mother catering to him all the time. that's what's so fabulous about him, though, is because brontë goes to great lengths to show that it doesn't take an especially great man to be kind and gentlemanly and good to women.

i do have a mini-rant about how people talk about gilbert, which i'm not going to indulge in much of here, but i'm deeply sick of how it seems like anyone who wants to defend him has to talk about how, yes, he's flawed. of course he is! that's a human being! anne brontë wouldn't be even half the writer she is if she didn't make him have some flaws, because ordinary people usually have a host of them! i'm not even talking about his hitting his friend lawrence with the whip, because 1) that was completely provoked, and 2) i actually thought it was wonderful that he didn't immediately come out of it with good grace and an acute sense that he'd done wrong. i loved that it took him a little bit to admit that to himself, because that's people. anyway.

this is getting long, so if you want to continue to hear my thoughts, feel free to append to this post or send me an ask.

bethanydelleman

I love your points about Gilbert! (he's a gentleman farmer or yeoman, Lawrence is the only gentry in the area, but that's not a big deal. However, that is why he's so nervous to meet Helen again at the end when she is very solidly rich and gentry. Also, probably why the snobby Lawrence doesn't want Gilbert and Helen together)

One of the important things about Arthur's evil though is that he doesn't really touch Helen. It's still so rare to see a woman who is "just" being abused financially and emotionally, but not physically or sexually by her husband and Anne Brontë STILL says, "This is intolerable, she should be able to kidnap her son and leave." And what makes Helen finally leave is that Arthur is corrupting her son and turning him against her. Everything else she was determined to endure.

oscarwetnwilde

Philosophy moments in Jeeves And Wooster.

mylordshesacactus

For all that the 1800s etiquette guides are--obviously--derangedly sexist from a modern perspective? They're also mindblowing in how casually they will assert things that MODERN DAY CONSERVATIVES would scream and cry and shit their pants about.

"People back then always married young it's natural!!!" Every single 1800s guide I've ever met casually mentions that, of course, you really shouldn't get married before you're at least 20, and waiting until 25 is usually better.

Or, like. Okay here's a long segment:

Just firmly going "it is crazy sexist to blame The Wife for overspending when thirty seconds of asking questions will immediately establish that her husband was outright lying to her about how much money they had. Talk to your wife like a normal person."

Or--okay, here. A section on being honest and not writing love letters in secret, because that's usually a good sign that there's something untoward going on....

....except that he then immediately acknowledges that sometimes, the reason you're hiding this from your parents is that your parents suck. That there are parents who frankly have not earned the right to approve or disapprove of your partner.

(I realize the phrasing there sounds a lot less strong than my summary, but--trust me on this. When you're familiar with the narrative voice of these kinds of books, this passage is downright radical. The mere acknowledgement that if you treat your kids badly, it's your own damn fault when they don't talk to you? I've genuinely never seen that before in this genre. Don't freak out over "properly trained", either. It's just a linguistic shift--at the time, "training" was used the way we would say "raising" a child today. )

mylordshesacactus

"Delete all the nudes and sexts after a breakup or you're a piece of shit" has been the standard expectation since EIGHT. TEEN. EIGHTY. FIVE.

mylordshesacactus

"Men and women being friends with each other is literally normal. Don't be a controlling freak."

Anyway I was wrong the publishing date is actually 1882 so like.

mylordshesacactus

"If you have to abuse a child to keep order in your classroom then you're a bad teacher."

So like @ the modern Republican party, are the "traditional family values" in the fucking room with us right now--

bethanydelleman

Okay that first quote is so very directed at Rosamund and Lydgate from Middlemarch it's insane

All of this is so interesting

blankpointdankmemes

matt-ruins-your-shit

spaceshipoftheseus

Look, this is my litmus test: I pretend I am the original Earl of Sandwich. I have asked for non-bread foods to be brought to me inside bread, that I might more easily consume them one-handed while gambling.

This does not enable my wretched regency habits. This is not what I asked for. I do not deign to grace it with the name of my house.

dirkbolero

This is the most important addition to the sandwich discourse I have ever read.

anachrosims

just in case anyone forgot how wildly colorful Georgian interiors could be, even among the working class to the wealthy:

anachrosims

and EVEN WHEN things were more muted/neutral, the neutrality was OFFSET by ACCENT COLORS and HIGH CONTRAST between the wood tones and everything ELSE

ALSO AMERICAN COLONIAL INTERIORS POPPED OFF, Y'ALL (IN TERMS OF COLOR/COZINESS)

PEOPLE USED WHITEWASH AND COLORFUL TRIM OR EVEN JUST COLORFUL FURNITURE IF THEY COULD AFFORD TO DO SO

AND DON'T GET ME STARTED ON FRENCH AND BRITISH AND AMERICAN WALLPAPERS

"ELIZABETH" YOU CRY, "WHY ARE YOU BEING SO EXTRA THIS MORNING?! IT'S MONDAY"

Because, my friend, my war on GREIGE will NEVER end.

Historic interiors were filled with LIFE and LIGHT and COLOR. ALWAYS HAVE BEEN.

Part of the reason we don't see a lot of textile art is because, frankly, textiles tend to degrade over time - especially ones that had utility! And yes, pigments and weaving and dying all boosted the expense of things, when we were finally reliably block-printing fabrics and broad reams of paper, it was no longer just the wealthy who could afford pretty patterns!

In the Americas, a far wider variety of pigments also became available because of the abundance of... well, a shitton of flora and minerals, some of which weren't as common in Europe.

WHY THE HIGHLIGHTER COLORS? you ask.

CANDLES.

Those colors reflect candlelight and natural sunlight REALLY WELL.

Humans LOVE bright colors, it's NOT just a thing for kids. We live in a brilliant, vibrant, multifaceted world. We ALWAYS have.

(STOP MAKING YOUR HISTORIC SIMS 4 BUILDS BE BLAND. STOP IT.)

periodinteriors

On the subject of Colonial America: don't forget, even if you couldn't afford wallpaper, wall stenciling might still be in reach!

(If ever you have the opportunity to visit the Stencil House at the Shelburne Museum in Vermont (pictured above at 3, 4, and 5), I highly recommend.)

And that's before you get into American painted murals:

Embrace the decorative arts, folks!

pmamtraveller

'The Kelpie Pond' by Jaimie Whitbread

azspot

“Because the truth is, tech doesn’t have an image problem. It doesn’t have a message problem. It has an intention problem. What’s wrong with the axe murderer who broke into my house is not that he hasn’t successfully persuaded me to buy into his narrative. What’s wrong is that he’s trying to kill me with an axe. Similarly, when you launch a product that’s designed to put millions of people out of work, block access to sources of verifiable truth, replace human creativity with slop, and lower the barriers to every sort of atrocity, the problem isn’t that you haven’t told the public a good story about those things. The problem is that you are trying to do them.”

— The 40 Most Rage-Inducing Problems in Tech

santhipoma

the-big-mood

At Toba aquarium in Japan, after closing time, some clever little otter pups help their grandpa tidy up their toys. As a reward, he gives them ice cubes

chryza

literally in tears at this video....such good helpers......

cute-animals-only

marlynnofmany

I hope this photographer won a prize

momento-more

@elodieunderglass - This made me think of you.

elodieunderglass

Thank you so much for this

blumineck

Happy Ides of March, folks!

Please support me on Patreon if you like these videos

bethfuller

does anyone have that unsettling oil painting of a dark window with a sheet leading out into the darkness? it did the rounds on tumblr a while ago and i need itttt

bethfuller

YES THANK YOU

Dragan Bibin, Dead of Night

1989nihil

@lee-and-other-things

i don’t… see a dog??? 👀

captainhaterade

Litmus test for “is the brightness on your phone too low for art appreciation”

huntress1013

Yesterday, Disney asked users on Threads to use Disney quotes to show how they are currently feeling. To say that this did not go according to Disney's plan would be an understatement 😂

They deleted the thread, but they should know that this doesn't help because now the videos are making their rounds 🤣😂

books-beer-boardgames

Annual reblog of the liminal spacemas from instachaz

animatingforfun

For Christmas this year, I got a Jurassic Park Velociraptor toy, and even though it’s now a few days past Christmas, I decided to make this stopmotion video because I couldn’t stop laughing at the idea. Enjoy!

Animated with Stop Motion Studio Pro app on my iPad.

higglety

This is a masterpiece

chillyfeetsteak

from this article, which is well worth the read, if only for the fun of seeing zuck get dunked on

silyaspider

"It's not intelligence it's just prediction and pattern recognition!" IDK... what is intelligence? What is thinking?

lastoneout

So the best way I can explain this is like, a computer program is, in it's essence, a very complex math problem designed to output a specific variable in response to the correct input. One of the first things most computer science students learn to code is called a "Hello, World!" program, which is a short string of code that, when you press the right button, types out the words "Hello, World!" on the terminal screen. A LLM/AI is a huge and extremely complicated string of code designed to be able to tell you, when given a sentence in the form of a question, what words in the English language statistically are most likely to come next. It is quite literally the predictive text feature on your keyboard dialed up to five thousand times the scale(and of course operating cost). You give it a series of words in the form of a question, and it tells you what words most commonly follow those in whatever language you're using. It's a search engine for a language, a bot that lets you interface with a fancy spreadsheet. Like most computer programs, if you're an admin you can crack an LLM open and see every single command it ran, and so it is possible to confirm that the ONLY thing the AI is actually doing is generating statistically probable text, and it's not even particularly good at it.

Like, one of the reasons we know Koko and other gorillas and apes can't actually learn ASL or any human language is because they do not display private speech. All humans with language have private speech, we talk to ourselves, even deaf people will sign to themselves, but when we teach an ape even the most accurate sign language they can possibly replicate and not the shit the Gorilla Foundation is pretending is ASL, when recorded in private they never use it. Not a single time. They don't even use "Gorilla Sign" at all. They only ever use it in response to input from a human who can give them something they want. They are not actually learning a language, they're learning to associate a specific sound with a desired response or action. The human says this sound at me, I do this motion with my hand, I get food, or a toy, or attention, and once the human is gone the speech stops.

But the thing is, the AI isn't even doing that much. Apes and dogs still do think, they just don't do it in English. Your dog can think "I want to go outside" in feelings and hormones and bodily signals saying it needs to pee or poop or run around, and then sit by the door, or come get you holding their leash, or press a button that they know makes the sound that means they get to go outside. The AI wont do anything without outside prompting, not like animals do. It's like the ASL going away when the humans leave, the ape stops using ASL entirely because it doesn't need ASL and in it's private moments it sees no reason to continue using the hand movements that make the humans pay attention to it. You can crack the AI open and see that without human input it does nothing. It has no private speech or private moments at all, it doesn't do anything if you don't press buttons. It just sits there in the active state waiting for you to press any key. My fiance @shengraf said it best, if you open up chatGPT right now and ask "What were you thinking about just now before I logged in?" it wont tell you what it was thinking about because it doesn't think or do anything at all when you aren't talking to it. It will tell you whatever the statistically most common response to the common question "what were you just thinking about?" and then it will proceed to do absolutely nothing at all while it waits for you to ask it another question because it is physically incapable of doing anything without a human pressing a button first.

It's a computer program. It's a complicated one for sure, but at it's core what it's doing is performing an output in response to an input. That is not the same thing as thinking, just like your dog pressing the button for outside or a gorilla making a butchered sign for treat isn't the same thing as understanding human language.

But honestly? All that to say I do think the article focuses a little bit too much on questions like "what is thinking" and instead should be focusing on the fact that under the most ideal circumstances, when the deck is stacked in it's favor so hard it's almost funny, Meta's AI still couldn't do what they are trying to convince you it can. My problem with AI isn't really plagiarism, though I do think there's nothing wrong with wanting to be compensated for your work to be used in an LLM by a massive company worth millions, but I digress, the issue aside from the massive environmental costs is that it doesn't work. It does not do what the people selling it say it does. The entire product is built on lies. If I set up a science experiment to test a hypothesis and I do it under the most ideal circumstances possible, everything set up so that there's essentially no possible way this process could output anything other than the specific and exact results I am looking for, and it still comes back saying my hypothesis is wrong...then I and everyone else would be comfortable saying yes, my hypothesis is wrong.

Under the most ideal circumstances imaginable that thing can't even do what google and whatsinmyfridge.com can do in a split second. Give me a recipe for Korean steak sauce based off of the ingredients I have on hand. And because the AI, yes cannot think, and also doesn't work, all it can do is repeat a sentence that is sometimes in recipes back at you while you become increasingly confused and frustrated with no way to actually explain to the AI why it's wrong because it's a predictive text algorithm, not a person with a brain who can think and speak and act, or even an animal that can think and act. I can look at the table and recognize that something is missing and then choose to voice that as well as a possible solution, for animals thinking and making noise and moving are not the same thing, and you can do all three at the same time. Thinking and speaking and acting are exactly the same thing to the AI, because it's just generating words the math problem it's made of says is the most statistically correct string of words to follow the words you input. I cannot stress enough, all that's happening is the LLM generating text.

A computer program is not capable of thought, just computations based on input. It is not doing anything else and that is not the same thing as being able to think, and that does reveal that the real problem with AI is that we're being lied to about what it's capable of because it doesn't work and, at least according to OpenAI's own researchers, it can't.

In a landmark study, OpenAI researchers reveal that large language models will always produce plausible but false outputs, even with perfect

According to them, the hallucinations are because what the AI is doing is taking all of the possible answers to a series of words and guessing which is right, which is weighted by frequency but not enough to stop it from sometimes giving you the "wrong" answer. 90% of the time the answer to "What is 2+2?" is "4" but sometimes the answer is 5, or 5!, or fish. So they're using fancy corporate yes-speak to admit AI is just a fucking picker wheel that lands on fish or 5 sometimes with no explanation for why it didn't say 4 other than probability.

It can't think. It is not intelligent. It's a set of dice rolls and a dictionary, and it doesn't even work because it literally physically cannot do what the people selling it say it can. It's a grift, and they know it, and they're gonna keep trying to turn pollution and lies into money until everyone wakes up and figures out that this is bullshit and a massive waste of the average person's time and money.

increasingly-insane-direwolf

Half Goblin, half Hobbit.

Goblit.

increasingly-insane-direwolf

God dammit I did this just for a pun but now I’m imagining this whole backstory where a wounded female goblin flees from some battle and winds up on the edges of the Shire and she’s gonna jump some Hobbit dude named Blinko Tumbrush but Blinko’s so unfailingly polite that his first reaction on seeing someone in a rough situation is to invite them in to dinner and gobbo chick is just like “… uh… ‘kay.”

And then she has dinner and it’s the best thing she’s ever eaten and even her little green brain is able to put together “If I knife this guy so I can take his stuff he can’t cook more of this” so when he asks her to stay the night she’s just like “Fuck yeah breakfast”.

And all the other Hobbits in the area are staring at this new arrival who starts begrudgingly working in the garden (she can pull out the weeds they’d normally have to hitch livestock to) and they’re all thinking “Uhhhhh that’s a fucking Goblin there, chief” except if they actually acknowledge that she’s a goblin then it’s a huge to-do and a lot of excitement and possibly there would be adventure involved in chasing her off. So they just sort of silently, collectively decide they’re going to ignore it and all go “Oh, Blinko finally found himself a lady, how nice, she must be one of the Glumbrushes from over the far side of West Farthing, I always did hear they were on the homely side, not much hair on their feet you know.”

And eventually in due time along comes Korbo Tumbrush and decently cute Hobbit baby but the biggest fucking ears you ever saw on a Hobbit and he’s a bit green and everyone is thinking “That’s a fucking half-Goblin you’ve got there, chief, you fucked a fucking Goblin, you made a baby with a damn Goblin my guy” but this would be an immensely rude thing to say to someone so they’re just like “Oh how nice, Blinko, he looks just like you, has those Glumbrush eyes though.”

And Korbo the Goblit grows up a proper little man in his waistcoat and pipe and every so often someone visits from a different part of the shire and sees this plump green dude with massive flappy pointed ears and they start to open their mouth only for a local to leap right in and go “HAHA YES THAT IS KORBO TUMBRUSH A VERY UPRIGHT HOBBIT WE ALL LOVE KORBO HE’S GLUMBRUSH ON HIS MOTHER’S SIDE (WE THINK) THAT EXPLAINS EVERYTHING!!!” and the visitor just starts nodding along emphatically because this is clearly something that is Not Spoken Of.

urbanfantasyinspiration

I fuckin love it

countless-potr

I. I have to know …

Does Korbo know!? Like is the Gobit aware his momma is a goblin? Or does he just grow up like

“yup us Glumbrushes sure do look different”

He leaves home on an adventure and stumbles n a hoard of goblins marches right up like

“how do ya do fellow hobbits? You know I’m half Glumbrush myself”

increasingly-insane-direwolf

Alright, so, Korbo got in a fight once.

Once.

The Tumbrushes are, as a family trade, purveyors of fine pieces of wood. Not of large amounts of lumber, for which Hobbits don’t have a particular lot of call save occasionally, but rather of particularly nice pieces suitable for the making of fine window trimmings, floors, or the occasional carved bit of artwork to be given at a fancy event. Obviously for this one doesn’t go cutting down any tree willy-nilly, and Korbo had spent most of the day out and about looking for suitable trees.

(Korbo also personally assisted in cutting them down, being rather well known as on the strong side for a Hobbit, wink wink, nudge nudge.)

Having put in a genuine hard day’s work and rather pleased with himself, Korbo retired to the local bar to have a few beers and a smoke and to partake in good company, all of whom had gotten so used to pretending there was nothing odd about him that it was almost as if there was genuinely nothing odd about him.

Until along comes Humdil Thumbletoe.

Now the Thumbletoes were what was known in the Shire as “experts on genealogy”. This might sound like quite a good thing when you consider how well-versed most Hobbits are in their family lines, until you consider that most Hobbits are already well-versed in their family lines. A Hobbit being thoroughly knowledgeable of their family tree is not much to be remarked upon, so when it is remarked upon it is more to mean that the Hobbits in question are such tremendous mooches that they have had to dive far more deeply into their bloodlines looking for more relatives to leech off of than any Hobbit would generally consider polite.

Humdil was fairly brawny as Hobbits go, which was about all you could say for him. In fact Humdil had realized that was really all that could be said for him and had become a bit of a bully. And so it was he entered the bar that night with a very put-upon third cousin twice removed (by marriage) and caught sight of Korbo for the first time.

“Why, look at that one!” he bellowed, guffawing. “He’s so ugly his mother had to have been a Goblin, ey!”

The whole bar goes quiet. Aside from the obvious abominable rudeness of this, Humdil has said the thing that is never supposed to be said, and is clearly too stupid to realize he’s right. All heads slowly turn to Korbo.

Now, it is well known that Korbo has inherited his father’s tendency to never give a single solitary hairy-toed fuck about anything. He has currently been in the running to be at least the second most chill dude to ever be born in the Shire. And indeed, right now he’s still looking perfectly calm, puffing on his pipe. He sets the pipe aside, finishes off the last of his beer, and stands up.

“Sir, we’ll be needing to step outside.”

Now Hobbits are mostly a peaceable lot, not given to wars or fighting for any old thing, but a bit of fisticuffs outside the bar is hardly unheard of. Mostly everyone is kind of nervous about this because they’re still not sure how Korbo is reacting to this whole Goblin thing. So someone takes Korbo’s jacket and Humdil’s third cousin twice removed (by marriage) grudgingly takes his, and the two square off.

Now, Humdil was a big Hobbit, it was true, but there were a few things that, being a moron who didn’t realize he was right, and who had never been outside the Shire or seen a Goblin anyway, he could not possibly know.

For one, Goblins have long, spindly arms, giving them a surprisingly good reach for their size… not abominably long, certainly not in the case of a half-Goblin, and certainly not above being concealed by the cut of a well-tailored shirt. Second, they are compact, wiry creatures, with dense muscle over their otherwise lanky forms, and given to that a Hobbit’s already greater mass and the anchoring benefit of large, wide feet, well.

The moment Humdil stepped forward and started to swing, Korbo’s fist shot out like one of Gandalf’s better rockets and struck him directly in the nose. His flight was also, for some weeks after, compared to one of Gandalf’s rockets, though not quite as far and the explosion at the end was mostly him laying on the ground cursing wetly due to all the blood streaming from his nose.

Korbo apologizes profusely to all and sundry for the disturbance, collected his jacket, and goes home. Honey is out picking mushrooms (still being of the more nocturnal persuasion after all these years), but Blinko’s sitting by the fire reading a book. Korbo sees that there’s a newspaper (full of lots of extremely important things like how the pipeweed was growing and which barrels of beer were going to be uncasked that month), so picks it up and sits down to read.

“Evening, Da.”

“Evening, son. Pleasant evening out?”

“Oh, fine. Save for I broke Humdil Thumbletoes’s nose for him.”

“Hm, hm, I see. Why did you feel the need to do that?”

“Well, he called Ma a Goblin, you see.”

Blinko slowly lowers his book, and slowly raises his head. Looks at Korbo for long moments. Raises one eyebrow a little.

“Son. You know full well your mother is a Goblin.”

“Well, yes, but he didn’t know that, and he said it as an insult anyway so it being true or not doesn’t really matter that much, does it?“

“Hm, hm. I suppose that’s true at the end of the day, isn’t it?”

Blinko goes back to reading his book. Korbo continues reading the paper.

“You could have stabbed him,” Blinko eventually notes.

“Aye, could have stabbed him,” Korbo agrees easily enough. “But it’s a bit of a mess, isn’t it?”

“True, true, probably would have been a bit of a mess in the road, not very thoughtful to the community,” Blinko allows.

And that was the end of it.

pens-and-paperbacks

I love all of this so much. Also-

“Sir, we’ll be needing to step outside.”

The power. I set down my drink after that one.

prismatic-bell

Oddly enough, one might expect Korbo to have trouble finding a lady hobbit. He’s not given to being as plump as his fellows, and his feet are a bit small, and he’s rather, well, tall for a hobbit, isn’t he. And green. Always looks a bit like he’s eaten something that didn’t agree with him.

But he runs into Hilda Greebrook one day in town, and she’s lost her favorite pipe, which is of course a tragedy of the highest order. It’s not unheard of for a lady to smoke, but it isn’t particularly encouraged, either, and so the general reaction is “you poor dear, perhaps it’ll turn up, hadn’t you best be getting home for luncheon?”

Korbo, however, stops to help her look for the pipe, and when it’s nowhere to be found he offers to make her another just like it, if she can tell him what precisely made it so special that it was a favorite, for after all a favorite must be distinguishable by something.

Unfortunately the thing that distinguishes it is that she got it from Gandalf and it’s quite unlike most pipes in the Shire, so recreating it is quite the task. But Korbo sets himself to it anyway, working a bit each night and handing it to Hilda daily to see if it feels quite right, and six months later he’s done it—recreated a pipe that came from the world of men, or perhaps elves, but certainly not that of hobbits.

Hilda for her part discovers Korbo quite likes to read, and though he’s from a reasonably well-to-do family—for hobbits are always in need of new toys and fancy party decorations after all—can’t get his hands on books fast enough to satisfy himself, and, well, her da’s a transcriber, someone’s got to write out the papers after all, and she’s got access to practically every book in the Shire, and ways to make copies besides.

At first people think it’s odd, a hobbit who can’t see asking to borrow books, but then they find out Korbo is involved and asking questions could lead to excitement and so they absolutely do not ask and simply offer up their histories and books of poetry and hobbit folklore (for even without want for excitement there are things it’s good to remember, and things every hobbit child should know so they, too, can grow up properly plump and staying well away from adventure), and resign themselves to never seeing their books again.

And then they find that far from their books quite disappearing, they return in fine form—albeit usually in a timeframe rather too long to be polite—but oddly quite a lot seem to have tiny bits of wood shavings in, although one wouldn’t expect it in a hobbit home? And THEN Hoptus Redbranch finds Korbo one day in his workshop, he’s just stopped by for the wood to repair a door after an unfortunate incident with attempting to remove a colony of bees and rather too much smoke for the moving of bees, and Korbo is simply. Pressing small pieces of hot iron into a very thin piece of wood, making small triangle patterns like no hobbit decoration Hoptus has ever seen, and he’s quite frequently checking into a book on his left that turns out to be one of Hoptus’ own books, and very carefully turning the pages with a cloth so as to not get oil from the hot iron all over the pages—

—and THEN, not long after the news of Korbo’s strange woodburning activities have spread across most of the Shire (and caused no small amount of consternation, because goblins are clever but so often the things they make are cruel and the cause of ever so much unpleasantness), Hilda is seen in her own garden with Korbo with a stack of these thin pieces of wood all carefully hinged together, running her fingers over carefully sanded and varnished pieces and feeling the triangles and reciting a hobbit tale.

For all those months of strangely disappeared books, Korbo has been translating Westron into an alphabet that can be read with one’s fingers, and making Hilda books, and teaching her to read them.

Nobody is entirely surprised, after about three years, when the two of them vanish for a few months, and come back quite married.

limnaia

Within a few generations, this is absolutely going to be a thing Not Worth Remarking Upon. So when a young hobbit finds themselves accidentally ripping the knobs off doors when they’re cross, their parents will sigh and the elder hobbits in the village will remark that ‘that’ll be the Glumbrush in ‘im coming through, I told you his ears were a little bigger than his siblings, didn’t I?’ much the same as they always did on Bilbo and Frodo’s Took relations and the resulting hankering for adventure.

Were anyone from the outside to visit the Shire, they’d find a small colony of goblins thoroughly intermarried and also avoiding the usual goblin tendencies towards stabbing, so long as no one is so gauche as to insult them for being goblins.

(Sooner or later, one very flustered hobbit is going to accidentally do the same thing with an orc.)

stargazeranswers

The Tumbrushes, as with all Hobbits, were quite proud of their work, and rightly so. Their works are fine, of the highest quality, and they fetch the appropriate price for their labors, making them quite well-to-do. In the Shire, wealth breeds respect, of course, and so the Tumbrushes are quite well respected.

And yet there’s a difference between “well to do” and “scandalously wealthy.”

So when, when Blinko Tumbrush recieved a letter inviting them to the Baggins residence for tea, he of course brought his wife and son along.

Now, Korbo had crossed paths with Bilbo Baggins a time or two in the market, never for much longer than the time required for Polite Conversation, and so wasn’t expecting much. Sure, everyone knew Bilbo was odd, and were willing to talk about it, since Bilbo made no effort to hide his adventures and had, on numerous occasions, commented on visiting the elves or poking around the mountains, but they were in the Shire, no adventure in sight, and so this should be a normal, proper visit between client and craftsman.

And then Bilbo opened the door, pipe in hand, took the three of them in, and said, quite out of nowhere, “Ah, Shoebiter clan.”

Honey Tumbrush, late of the Shoebiter clan of the Misty Mountains, smiled with all her teeth and replied “Dragon thief!”

Bilbo guffawed and waved them inside, offering them hospitality in the goblin tongue, with the guarantee of safety and threat of violence that implied. They had arrived in time for second breakfast, and didn’t leave until past dinner, having hammered out a contract and shared many a story.

Blinko Tumbrush had only one thing to say as he walked home, arm in arm with his wife and son trailing behind. “He’s an odd fellow, that Bilbo, but nice enough. Yes, nice enough indeed.”

mrkida-art

I love them

peaceheather

Gets better and better every time I see it

silverwolftales

What was removed?! Which guidelines did it violate? This post was complete last time I saw it.

mrkida-art

Here’s my art that apparently was too much for tumblr!

hilaritatis

I’d probably have rebageled anyway, but because of the Tumblr content removal, I *HAD* to…

deehellcat

Another one I’ve probably reblogged multiple times, but not sure I’ve seen it since the ‘content violation’. lol. I especially love Korbo falling for Hilda and basically inventing Westron Braille for her. <3 It makes me think of this one fic I love that includes something along that line, where a f/f orc couple (who steal every scene they are in!) settle in the Shire post- War of the Ring, others follow, and a pleasant bit of cross-pollination occurs.

comicgeekscomicgeek

Worth another reblog.

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