[ID: A screenshot of Boromir of Gondor from Lord of the Rings, Fellowship of the Ring, standing in Rivendell and staring (at either Legolas or Aragorn) off camera. The subtitle has been edited to say
AO3 has no App.
AO3 needs no App.
/ID]

if i look back, i am lost
ojovivo

Origami Around
DEAR READER
dirt enthusiast
todays bird
Cosmic Funnies
tumblr dot com
Show & Tell

titsay
I'd rather be in outer space 🛸
Aqua Utopia|海の底で記憶を紡ぐ

ellievsbear

No title available
Monterey Bay Aquarium
Not today Justin
Three Goblin Art

祝日 / Permanent Vacation

PR's Tumblrdome
RMH

seen from United States

seen from United States

seen from Türkiye
seen from United States

seen from Brazil

seen from United Kingdom
seen from United States
seen from United States

seen from United States

seen from United States
seen from Germany
seen from Bangladesh

seen from Germany
seen from Netherlands

seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from Russia
seen from Poland
seen from Switzerland
seen from Türkiye
@thedeadhandofseldon
[ID: A screenshot of Boromir of Gondor from Lord of the Rings, Fellowship of the Ring, standing in Rivendell and staring (at either Legolas or Aragorn) off camera. The subtitle has been edited to say
AO3 has no App.
AO3 needs no App.
/ID]
In Orwell’s essay “A Hanging,” the writer watches the condemned man, walking toward the gallows, swerve to avoid a puddle. For Orwell, this represents precisely what he calls the “mystery” of the life that is about to be taken: when there is no good reason for it, the condemned man is still thinking about keeping his shoes clean. It is an “irrelevant” act (and a marvelous bit of noticing on Orwell’s part). Now suppose this were not an essay but a piece of fiction. And indeed there has been a fair amount of speculation about the proportion of fact to fiction in such essays of Orwell’s.
The avoidance of the puddle would be precisely the kind of superb detail that, say, Tolstoy might flourish; War and Peace has an execution scene very close in spirit to Orwell’s essay, and it may well be that Orwell basically cribbed the detail from Tolstoy. In War and Peace, Pierre witnesses a man being executed by the French, and notices that, just before death, the man adjusts the blindfold at the back of his head, because it is uncomfortably tight. The avoidance of the puddle, the fiddling with the blindfold—these are what might be called irrelevant or superfluous details. They are not explicable; in fiction, they exist to denote precisely the inexplicable. This is one of the “effects” of realism, of “realistic” style.
But Orwell’s essay, assuming it records an actual occurrence, shows us that such fictional effects are not merely conventionally irrelevant, or formally arbitrary, but have something to tell us about the irrelevance of reality itself (…) There was no logical reason for the condemned man to avoid the puddle. It was pure remembered habit. Life, then, will always contain an inevitable surplus, a margin of the gratuitous, a realm in which there is always more than we need: more things, more impressions, more memories, more habits, more words, more happiness, more unhappiness.
— JAMES WOOD, from How Fiction Works.
What exactly do these irrational standards mean? They mean the supremacy of the detail over the general, of the part that is more alive than the whole, of the little thing which a man observes and greets with a friendly nod of the spirit while the crowd around him is being driven by some common impulse to some common goal. I take my hat off to the hero who dashes into a burning house and saves his neighbor’s child; but I shake his hand if he has risked squandering a precious five seconds to find and save, together with the child, its favorite toy. I remember a cartoon depicting a chimney sweep falling from the roof of a tall building and noticing on the way that a sign-board had one word spelled wrong, and wondering in his headlong flight why nobody had thought of correcting it. In a sense, we all are crashing to our death from the top story of our birth to the flat stones of the churchyard and wondering with an immortal Alice in Wonderland at the patterns of the passing wall. This capacity to wonder at trifles — no matter the imminent peril — these asides of the spirit, these footnotes in the volume of life are the highest forms of consciousness, and it is in this childishly speculative state of mind, so different from commonsense and its logic, that we know the world to be good.
— VLADIMIR NABOKOV, from Lectures on Literature.
You know I gotta learn shitpost brevity. Most of my successful posts are like 3 paragraph essays, minimum. Fucking dissertations. Terrible note-to-word ratio. Inefficient. In this economy? In this economy? Unsustainable. Everyone else posting "blowing my balls up at the bomb factory" and getting 50,000 notes. Amazing ROI. They're the future and I'm on dial-up. The market's gonna out-compete me.
Word for today: thrave
Two completely unrelated meanings: as a verb, to urge, and as a noun, a group of 24 wheats or sometimes 12 or sometimes any large number in that region
the current administration would totally fall for the Trojan horse. they'd take promo pictures of it on the white house lawn and the president would be on TV talking about how it's made of a big beautiful American lumber or some shit.
If you met someone with the same last name as you, how surprised would you be?
Not at all, it's very common
A little surprised, but wouldn't immediately assume a connection
I would be surprised and assume there was some relation
I would be very surprised that I *hadn't* met this person, we must be related
Does anyone else with this last name even exist?
i genuinely love that the way k.a applegate resolves the issue of needing the alien on the team to be able to drop plot crumbs without totally solving everything for the human kids is by making aximili-esgarrouth-isthill a jock who only tangentially paid attention to when his teachers were explaining, like, the andalite equivalent of how to find the cosine of a triangle, and now he's in an astronomically rare circumstance where the fate of an entire species depends on him remembering how to do that. and he's cold sweating trying to recall the answers to homework problems he didn't do. and also he's always lying.
ax is literally experiencing like if you got teleported back several hundred years and everyone was expecting you to explain the precise mechanisms of how cell phones work to them and if you don't come up with a sufficient explanation they're all going to die. And he's not enjoying it.
every day this happens to ax
I'm gonna say something incredibly 30-year-old and I'm going to ask you to not judge me while I'm trying to be genuine and real. Okay? Here's my truth.
A piece of lettuce can really elevate a sandwich. The fresh crunch? Unrivaled. Peak. Poetic cinema.
absolutely flabbergasting to see people who have so enthusiastically succumbed to despair. like okay denethor, but some of us are gonna actually face the armies of mordor in battle nonetheless.
The thing about Denethor is that he not only succumbed to despair, he wanted to ensure that Faramir succumbed with him. Similarly, a lot of people now are not only succumbing to despair, they're actively proselytizing despair, trying to convince others to join them in their hopelessness. Despair is apparently lonely and they want company in their self-immolation.
btw denethor succumbed to despair bc he was doomscrolling on the palantir. Sauron tweaked his algorithm so he only saw bad news, and he fell into the trap of thinking the world couldn't be saved.
Comedians in the '70s and cartoons in the '90s: weird how your kids can watch violence and murder on TV but the FCC wants us dead if we say the word nipple.
Internet users in 2025: you didn't warn me that there would be erotic themes in the game you just mentioned which is fucked up because I thought it was going to be a normal "morally struggle with killing people" game but now it's gone too far :-/
A lot of you are playing into a lot more reactionary of hands than I think you would like when you act like tits are more shocking than gun violence.
We need to call people posers again. We gotta. We just gotta. No you aren't a countercultural weirdo because you made a battle jacket, you get tangibly viscerally uncomfortable if someone is breast feeding in public and that is incredibly square of you.
i think it’s funny when someone acts really angry about something you say online. could be whatever. and you check their profile and go. oh wait. you’re literally 14. nevermind. talking about this with you is like 100% useless. and they go “my age has nothing to do with this” like actually your age has everything to do with this. when you are 14 literally everything is influenced by how fucking 14 years old you are.
They’ve been rebuilding the Tower of Babel, but this time they have a team of linguists on site. Every time God smites the builders and invents a dozen new languages, the linguists have a dozen decently sized translations in about a month and work can start up again.
The linguists have been really into it. They say the new phonemes are fascinating. As for God, I assume that at this point he’s just curious to see how far this goes.
To keep us on out toes, God gives the next group of builders an extra place of articulation called the flongus between the pharynx and the glottis, creating an entire new column of the IPA chart with sounds between sounds that are literally physiologically impossible for non-flongled people to replicate.
Improved symbols for the flongal plosives ("gacks"), flongal trill ("hacks"), flongal fricatives ("groans"), and and the flongal lateral approximant ("moans")
Update: The builders have now simply switched to communicating entirely through a universal sign language like they should've done to start with. No sounds need be spoken, flongal or otherwise. The Tower steadily rises. Be seeing you soon, God, you little bitch.
update: the builders are all speaking different sign languages now
I know it's unfair vilification and stuff but it's also a lot of fun to see old media and stuff where people were SO scared of big animals like lions, sharks, crocodiles and wolves were fully expected to just come and eat you the moment you stepped into their territory. In older media we also made that assumption about gorillas and in still older we thought it'd be whales. But some animals that will actually fuck you up got left behind. Boars will kill you and eat you. They're way more likely to do so than any of those other things actually. Hippos, obviously, got off like bandits always being depicted as cute and dopey. And then there's the squids. Not giant kraken size squids. The eight foot squids that hunt in packs and will fuck you up if you fall in the water at night. I can't BELIEVE people slept on that. It's like all they cared about were the huge deep sea ones we never see. The medium size wolf pack squids were right there.
Oh some of you don't know about the squids. I talked about them in another thread that went kinda viral somewhere or other but one of the reasons you should not swim in the open ocean at night in many parts of the world is that the water starts teeming with these:
And as you can see it is not like instant death, they too are just animals and they are often just gently curious about the presence of humans! But people who study and dive with sharks will tell you you're safe as long as you stay calm and know what you're doing. The world's leading professional night divers and experts on these squids, specifically??? Stress in every interview and article and paper they write in that you simply do not fuck around with these squids. They know what they're doing and they still all have at least one story of being attacked, in some cases having to be hospitalized. Considering just how rarely anybody puts themselves in the pitch dark nighttime ocean on purpose, let alone during a squid feeding frenzy, it sounds like they're quite a bit more likely to consider you potential food than other marine predators. We also don't know how many fatal attacks might have ever happened, because what humboldt squid like to do with large prey is just drag it away into the darkness forever. The two worst attacks ever proven involved two or three squid at a time latching on to a diver (in BOTH cases they were professionals and knew the risk!) and jetting straight downward with enough force that both divers suffered injury from the sudden pressure change alone, including burst eardrums, nearly passed out and they probably would have died if they hadn't broken free. In general, people who die drowning in the dark open ocean are either never found, or they're found in pieces picked over by enough scavengers that the precise cause of death can only be narrowed down to "the sea." But now you know ONE of "the sea's" possible murder weapons :)
There's a short section on Humboldt squid in Wikipedia's entry for Cephalopod attacks on humans:
And if you can get past some of Animal Planet's hokey presentation style, this video includes a bit of interview with one of those professional experts who still got nearly squidded from existence:
There is of course some debate about all this, with some arguing that all proven documented attacks occurred on people with reflective diving equipment, which they say the squid must have mistaken for the shine of fish. However, there are lots and lots of people who have to fish around these squids to survive, who do not have access to that kind of equipment, and also have a consensus that if you fall in the water when big squids are out hunting you might disappear without a trace or perhaps just get your head bitten open. With many modern science guys agreeing with this sentiment, this is one case where the "they're just misunderstood sea friends" crowd is kind of outnumbered. The sea at night is theirs and not ours is all. It's not ours during the day either but since we are neither marine nor nocturnal animals we are double fools in the eyes of the squids, which by the way are these eyes:
No for real:
Absolutely! Also, the Humboldt squid will hunt in packs, sometimes with one flashing brightly to draw attention while the others approach in near unseeable camoflage!
Beautiful footage of the nefarious sea demons also :)
Also because I can't reblog every addition together:
Okay where's the other 1199
I absolutely adore Humboldt squid. I saw a doc once where a scientist was cage diving to study them, and one of the squid squeezed it's entire massive body through the cage bars, bit the guy and squeezed right back out.
Why isnt this an animal that's already long gone viral like honey badgers once did. This is the animal that actually gives no fucks. People really are just that obsessed with bigger squids I guess? But the bigger ones frankly come across as big softies in comparison. One big sea monster can never be as intimidating as a thousand coordinated man sized sea monsters.
This is why I thought that if mermaids had a cultural equivalent to lycanthropy it'd be weresquids. Fun fact nocturnal marine life increases activity on the brightest nights ie the full moon.
This is all fascinating but I'm reblogging it exclusively for the phrase "got nearly squidded from existence."
- Mort, Terry Pratchett (#4 Discworld)
my toxic xennial trait is that i believe something should either be software (in which case after i download it i shouldn't need to be connected to use it) or a web page (which shouldn't require me to download anything to use it, however badly, in a browser). fuck your mandatory single function constant connection apps
You’re so right. Say more
Me: Many of the problems with D&D's culture of play stem from it being falsely advertised as a universal entry-level game, so a lot of groups don't realise that they disagree with the rules they're using about what kind of game they're playing.
The jokers in the notes: Obviously they should be playing a real universal entry-level game, like Pathfinder.
they should play the real, real universal entry-level ttrpg, Gurps
Spring at Catou (1873) by Pierre-Auguste Renoir