A whole lot of gnomes @thirtysixgnomes - Tumblr Blog

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costumeloverz71

Embroidered open front robe, 1780s

1o9

hometoursandotherstuff

datasoong47

adastra-sf

Happy Ceolacanth Saturday!

Meet your watery great grandma!

Coelacanths are among the most primitive fish, originating hundreds of millions of years before the dinosaurs, during the Devonian Period, when they swam in great numbers over much of the Earth.

They average 5 feet (1.5 m) long, and weigh about 100 pounds (45 kg).

The highly mobile fins of these ancient fish are attached to fleshy limbs with a single bone, like arms. Lobe-finned fish evolved into amphibians, reptiles, and eventually fully terrestrial animals.

Fish like these are our ancestors!

Coelacanths are slow-growing and long-lived: They become sexually mature between age 40 and 69, and can live to be 100 years old.

They are live-bearers who carry their young about five years before giving birth to well-developed offspring.

Fossil evidence had suggested ceolacanths went extinct 80 million years ago, until 1938 when a museum curator in South Africa found one in a pile of by-catch from local fishing boats.

Since then, populations have been identified in the West Indian Ocean, along the Eastern and Southern coasts of Africa, and in Indonesia. About 10,000 remain.

grickle14

Long flight.

grickle14

Made for the job.

lindagoesmushrooming

pangur-and-grim

what's the spider book 👀

I’m very happy you asked!

so we begin: an evil alien brain slug is infiltrating the Canadian parliament. his troop-leader has already secured the body of Canada’s future prime minister. he’s in the body of the prime minister’s son, and is pretending to be him (going to classes, following his routine, etc) UNTIL!!!! HE GETS HIT BT A TRUCK!!

the slug wakes up in a mausoleum. a glowing golden goddess tasks him with killing the demon king. he says “what?” but unfortunately the processes are already processing. he wakes up again: he’s in the body of a (formerly) dead prince, in medieval fantasy Britain.

seems pretty straight forward, right? well here’s the twist. in the depths of a castle, he finds a grey-skinned human/spider hybrid being held captive. this “spider man” has an eight pack. the slug is affected by the eight pack.

and now the spider is coming along on their crusade to kill the demon king. but wait! freeing him from imprisonment might have had consequences. the consequences being, the slug is now bondaged to the gills and being dragged underground, where the spider’s gigantic cannibalistic mother awaits.

and what happens next?? will the slug find a way to contact his troops, and resume their alien invasion in this new fantastical world? how will they fight the demon king? will the slug have anal sex with the spider? you’ll have to read to find out!

it’s called The Ignoble Invasion of Prince Proculo, and currently it’s in pre-order

pangur-and-grim

AND it’s currently 20% off on bookshop.org! which is a great alternative to amazon, by the way, as every order supports local bookstores

quillflower-art

dead guy and his 3 mad as hell divas

officerhaughtstuff

You’ve heard of the Roaring 20s........

now get ready for the Screaming 20s - coming to a decade near you in 2020

heterokatedison

is it too early or can we start screaming now

heterokatedison

in retrospect perhaps we should have started sooner

jorolle

this post is the equivalent of a newspaper from the day of the outbreak being blown past by the wind after you wake up in a post apocalyptic world

worldheritagepostorganization

World Heritage Post

hacvek

reminder to worldbuilders: don't get caught up in things that aren't important to the story you're writing, like plot and characters! instead, try to focus on what readers actually care about: detailed plate tectonics

olyia-stories

@dragonpyre any chance you could elaborate on this

dragonpyre

I grew up learning about land formations. Seeing fictional maps that don’t follow the logic and science of them makes me upset

serinos-kitt

What are the most common sins you’ve seen relating to this? I wanna know

dragonpyre

Mordor.

Why is the mountain range square. How did the mountain range form. Why is there one singular volcano in the center. Why does it act like a composite volcano but have magma that acts like it’s from a shield. If it’s hotspot based volcanic activity why is there only one volcano.

And then the misty mountains!!!! Why isn’t there a rain shadow!! And why is there a FOREST where the rain shadow should be!!!!!!!!

serinos-kitt

So what is a rain shadow?

lethalbutterfly

Wind blows clouds in from the sea, but mountains are so tall the clouds can't get past 'em, so you get deserts on the windward side of mountain ranges because clouds can't get there to water the land, or do so only very rarely.

roach-works

this is because, as clouds are forced upwards by rising land, they cool and dump their rain. so the side of the mountain facing the ocean (or an inland sea, or a great lake) gets all the rain as the clouds are squeezed out, and the opposite side gets nothing.

my favorite thing is the american great lake snowbelts! so, the 'flow' of weather across north america, in very general terms, blows from the northwest on down south and east to the gulf of mexico.

so the wind is blowing from west to east, and in the winter it's a dryer wind than in the summer because it's colder. but after blowing across a great lake for a hundred miles, the wind is wet again. and that wet turns into snow. so for all of these lakes, the big cities are on the west side, not the east sides, because the east sides absolutely suck to live on.

the sole exception is buffalo, NY, which literally has to be there because, unfortunately, that's where all the important canal stuff between lake ontario and lake erie is happening.

also this always strikes me as cool, check out where cleveland is:

it's right at the edge of that snowbelt. and you see way more cities west of it than east, too.

beatrice-otter

#but again. mordor looks like that becaue sauron made it#and he's an ass

On a Watsonian level, sure.

On a Doylistic level, Mordor looks like that because plate tectonics was a fringe, ludicrous, laughable theory that nobody outside serious geology nerds had ever heard of until scientists proved seafloor spreading in the early 1960s. The first edition of the LotR trilogy was published in 54-55. We literally did not know that plate tectonics was real until almost a decade after the book was published, so obviously, it was not something Tolkien could have been considering as he made his maps.

I don't know enough meteorological history to know when white people figured out about rain shadows and added it to geology classes, or what would have been taught about volcanoes and such. But any education Tolkien got on the subject would have been in childhood/adolescence; his college education focused on the liberal arts, not the sciences, and his professional study was linguistics and the middle ages. So anything Medieval and earlier European authors wrote about he had a pretty good chance of knowing about. But not much exposure to modern science. So his science knowledge was probably limited to "what English schools taught at the turn of the 20th Century."

whetstonefires

I mean, it's true he didn't know about plate tectonics, but he did know what mountains look like, and that it's not normally That. And it wasn't his style to break that kind of norm without cause.

LotR has recurring themes of the reckless imposition of one's will on the natural world creating ugliness, an order you thought was inherently an improvement that in fact is inferior to what you have displaced. (Typified by reckless tree-felling; a reflection of the despoiling of the English countryside and the world by Progress.)

Mordor is a rectangle because Sauron is an asshole.

beatrice-otter

#the rain shadow thing otoh was undoubtedly total ignorance#but those mountains were made as the fortress of a demigod#too steeped in evil to understand beauty#it's *supposed* to look like something that Shouldn't Exist#like quite often this is something that happens in worldbuilding yes#things are arranged Wrong because a person doesn't grasp the underlying logic#but mordor is a bad example for the same reason it's an obvious one#it's So Very Wrong because it was designed to be wrong#to give you a bad feeling with how much it shouldn't look like that#if he just wanted it unapproachable on all sides it could've been in a caldera formation it didn't *need* corners#the corners were a choice#tolkien's job involved lots of looking at maps and things okay#meanwhile people whose lives revolved around the weather generally knew where the rain happened#long before it was formalized into 'rain shadow effect'#people not having The Science doesn't mean they don't have eyes and brains

maryellencarter

I wrote an entire paper in college analyzing the geology of the Misty Mountains and to a lesser extent the White Mountains (the Misty Mountains are easier because we get a cross-section via Moria). One thing I discovered that still knocks me for a loop when I think about it is:

Moria is the only place in Middle-Earth where mithril is found, right? That's kind of a big deal. So, why? What makes that location so special? Is it just random?

I found a paper that had just been published *that year*, 2011 or 2012 as I was writing it, that studied the locations of precious-metals mines in the Pyrenees, the similarly long skinny mountain chain that divides Spain and France. This paper discovered that where there was a bend in the mountain chain, from one of the continental plates having an awkward corner in it that got subducted under the other plate, that had dug deeper into the mantle and caused precious-metal-bearing ores to flow up to the surface in ways they didn't do anywhere else in the Pyrenees.

There's a conversation in The Fellowship of the Ring where one of the hobbits -- I don't have my copy handy or I'd get the direct quote -- asks why they can see the Misty Mountains ahead of them at one point if they're still heading south from Rivendell, and it's explained that south of Caradhras (which you may recall is the surface mountain under which Moria runs) the mountain chain bends and runs southwest instead of due south for a while.

Tolkien had absolutely no way to know *why* this particular feature of a mountain range was associated with intrusions of rare and unique metal ores, but he had gone backpacking in mountains enough to know How Things Should Look.

(And as prev excellently points out, when Jirt made screwed-up geology it was very much on purpose. Mordor shouldn't be square! Mount Doom shouldn't be doing any of the things it does! A composite volcano shouldn't even have especially hot lava! Even the Gulf of Udun, the circular feature at the upper left corner of the square, shouldn't be like that -- perfectly round features should be impact craters or calderas, not The Mountains Just Do This In A Suspiciously Convenient Way. These are all the way they are because Sauron forced them to be, in defiance of the laws of nature. Remember, he's akin to Balrogs and was a Maia of Aulë -- he's a volcano spirit in many ways.)