Remember V is said F

In Tolkien’s dwarvish language, Vs are said as Fs, which really throws me for a loop every time I remember it. Also, no soft C in elvish.

[intj-confessions]

Every writing advice thing ever: Don’t get bogged down in details on your first draft. Just write! ☺️

Me: How I begin this scene hinges on whether cheese sandwiches were served with mayo in the 50’s.

[colourfullmess]

have not seen anything more relatable today >.<

[wufflesvetinari]

let me link the world’s most useful twitter thread. 

some excerpts:

there’s nothing to stop you from using the <get there> method for research details. in fact, i know many many writers who use it for just that.

[big-ass-magnet]

I think it was @theherocomplex who introduced me to this concept and saved my life. You can use it for more than just scenes. When you can’t think of a word, or you need a name or a detail, instead of breaking the flow to look it up and risking getting sucked into a wiki spiral, put it in brackets.

I couldn’t think of the word “specialized” , but instead of hitting the breaks to wrestle with a thesaurus for ten minutes, I put [specific, tailored to one situation] and went on. Then when I had time I could go back to my note, see what I’d wanted to get across, and remember the word.

It has saved me so many times.

[tolkiencravt]

Okay, hear me out.

21 Jump Street, but at Hogwarts.

[tolkiencravt]

Ding don’t, you’re wrong.

“…they imbibed or inhaled, through pipes of clay or wood, the smoke of the burning leaves of a herb, which they called pipe-weed or leaf, a variety probably of Nicotiana…” (J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lord Of The Rings Pt. 1, The Fellowship Of The Ring, Book One, Prologue .2 Concerning Pipe Weed)

[tolkiencravt]

Okay, hear me out. Tom Bombadil was one of the Vala.

He wore The Ring, and was completely unswayed by its power. Gandalf feared the influence of The Ring, to the point he would not carry it to Mordor.

I think Tom Bombadil may actually be Aulë, under an assumed name. Though it may not fit exactly. Though it does make sense that Mairon’s ring didn’t corrupt him, he taught him everything he knows.

He may have “fallen for” Yavanna, and possibly ran away with her to Middle Earth (conjecture, at best) causing him to take on the person of Tom Bombadil.

Of course, these are just the musings of a drunken madman.

[tolkiencravt]

Oookay, just got through the old forest (again) and I have thoughts. Good old Tom SANG to Old Man Willow, and threatened to sing worse things for him. He knows the songs of power, more evidence for him being a Vala.

[staff]

tumblr tuesday: shower thoughts

Shout out to those of you who wonder out loud on the internet. (And then come home from work in the evening to a bajillion notes from people with takes you hadn’t even considered on a topic you haven’t even thought about since making a half-asleep text post ten hours ago before your first coffee of the day.) Shout out to you and only you. And to these folks who have had some thoughts worth thinking:

thank god for skin! without it we would simply be peeled limes with complicated emotions

@decaffeinated-hoe does not need caffeine to have thoughts or write them down on the internet. We’re truly blessed!

caligula was a pretty fucked up guy, but in his defense if everyone called me a nickname that meant “little boots” i’d also probably execute a few people

@thoodleoo serves delightfully acerbic hot takes on the ancient Romans.

I think women in ponds giving out swords is a fine system of governmence actually. May i have one

@swordlesbianopinions is fairly straightforward: Here is a lesbian who likes swords and wielding opinions, which she does freely and, might we add, rather well. Bravo!

‘how kafkaesque’ i say waiting in line at the taco bell. you think im talking about the alienating bureaucracy of waiting in a single file line for food premade in another state but actually im talking about the dead cockroach in the corner

@mariowiki​ likes sea creatures with lots of skin. She has been here forever and still manages to be funny, which is kind of impressive, honestly.

And here, to round us out, is an elephant seal in desperate need of a shower (if not a thought.)

[tolkiencravt]

The only thing I learned in the two week quarantine that somehow took two years is that I read lips a lot more than I thought I did.

[inkwell-attitude]

all the tips I found for drawing a fantasy map are like :) “here’s a strategy to draw the land masses! here’s how to plot islands!” :) and that’s wonderful and I love them all but ??? how? do y'all decide where to put cities/mountains/forests/towns I have my map and my land but I’m throwing darts to decide where the Main Citadel where the Action Takes Place is

[fatal-blow]

okay so i know i said most of this in the replies but it might be easier to actually reblog and say stuff instead lmao

Cities - go near water!  freshwater lakes and rivers (rivers especially) are the best places for cities because A) source of water and B) travel and trade is much easier cus you can put your boats like right there.  Basically ever relevant city ever was built on a lake or a river.

for rivers in general - because gravity, rivers run from mountains (forming from melting snow and ice (this is why they get fat in spring–more stuff melting)) to lakes/ocean where they can empty out (and even lakes will have rivers leading out that eventually get to the ocean), which can help when mapping out where those start and end.  rivers are also much thinner and faster in steeper elevations and very slow and wide when the land is flat

mountains - i like to think of what the tectonic plates look like because that’s what makes mountains!  mountains are also never standalone they’re always in mountain ranges (archipelagos are really just underwater mountain ranges babey).  a cool trick I like to do is occasionally separate mountain ranges across continents, because over time the tectonic plates shifted and literally split the range in half.  These mountains are really old tho so they’ve eroded and therefore it makes them smaller and rounder (like the appalachians) as opposed to relatively young mountain ranges like the rocky mountains which have taller and sharper peaks

Another mountain trick: if your mountains run along the ocean, the ocean side of the mountains will get a LOT of rain while the other side will be very dry–almost desert-like, in fact.  think of temperate rainforests in British Columbia vs the drier conditions in the canadian prairies

forests - depends on how warm the area might be.  coniferous forests are found further north (before you hit the tree line, and then it’s only tundra onwards) but as you head south you get leafier trees, and the leaves tend to get larger too

If you think about general elevation too, you’ll have places that might be swampy (wet + lower).  if your world has an ice age like we did, then glaciers may have carved the land, leaving piles of soil in the south that was left when the ice receded and places where the bedrock has been bared north of that (like the Canadian Shield in Canada–the reason we see that is because of the glaciers)

You might also have a land that’s dotted in a shitton of freshwater lakes as well because the meltwater filled the holes that the glaciers scraped out (this is why canada has so many goddamn lakes)

and if the ice age was more recent than it was in our world, then you might not even have the forest re-growth and it could be a lot of open plains

tl;dr i like to think of major climate events that might have also shaped the land on top of some basic rules

[possiblypedanticrpgideas]

The Artifexian has an entire series on building your world from literally the stars down and then the ground up.

Worldbuilding Videos - YouTube

All my worldbuilding videos

Though, for fantasy, you can make the world operate on entirely different principles:

With that done, the actual topic of city placement can be covered by videos like this:

Or

Once you have your places, if you want help naming them in realistic ways, this video can help:

This one is on architecture, which is definitely a subset of cities:

But for a more relevant practical guide on making settlements realistic:

Here’s a quick guide for making demographics:

[marblechemist]

nickelodeon: zim cant hit people with his fist his hand has to be open. no punching. the children.

nickelodeon: dark harvest is allowed

[crtter]

[gallusrostromegalus]

If you were wondering: the thing that the studio doesn’t want depicted are unsafe activities a young child whose impulse control hasn’t grown in yet watching the show could feasibility imitate- not wearing a seatbelt, jumping off the garage roof with a pair of cardboard wings, throwing a proper punch at a peer etc. Because kids do imitate what they see around them as part of learning, so you don’t want to teach them something that could hurt someone or themselves until a bit more brain grows in.

Unsafe activities that are not within the scope of an elementary school student are fine- where’s a six year old going to get a missle launcher?

[artisticlicense-personal]

That genuinely answers a lot of questions I had about why kid-friendly media is as wonky as it is, and I love it.

[tolkiencravt]

Sarcastically calling someone “Einstein” just became relatively funnier to me.

If you break down the name “Einstein”, you get Ein Stein, which literally means “a stone”. You’re sarcastically comparing them to a genius, while simultaneously calling them a rock.

[astriiformes]

The Fellowship gets on the topic of their ages one night and Boromir comes to the dawning realization that he has absolutely no idea how old any of his companions are supposed to be at all

[astriiformes]

Boromir, pointing at the hobbits: I don’t know how your ages work

Boromir, pointing at Legolas and Gimli: I definitely don’t know how either of your ages work

Boromir, pointing at Aragorn: I thought I knew how your age worked but apparently I was wrong

Boromir, pointing at Gandalf: I especially don’t know how your age works

Gandalf: It doesn’t, but carry on

[elidyce]

Listen I will die on this hill. I don’t care what it says in the assorted apocrypha, if you go by the Actual Text of LOTR you can make a very good argument that Boromir is the youngest member of the group. 

The hobbits are the only ones given official ages in the text, and are between fifty or fifty-one and twenty-nine. Elves and dwarves notoriously age slowly, and Gimli is the offspring of one of Bilbo’s pals, so okay, we’ve established that he’s old enough to call the hobbits young, and Bilbo confirms for them that Aragorn is Pretty Old For A Bigjobs. Gandalf is, of course, eternal.

But we are never given any context for Boromir and Faramir’s ages, except that a) they are humans and, though Sons of Gondor, not much longer lived than most Bigjobs, and b) Faramir is A QuiteYoung Man. I was absolutely convinced, when I read the books as a youngun, that Boromir, being in ‘the flower of manhood’ iirc, was probably between 25 and 30.

And it would be Freaking Hilarious, okay, for Boromir to finally get around to actually asking how old this baby-faced hobbit carrying The Ring is, and get told ‘oh, he’s only fifty, but he’s very steady for his age.’

Boromir: ?!?!?!

And then Pippin and Merry start asking everyone how old they are because this is fascinating are we all official adults here except for Pippin or what.

Boromir: …. Pippin isn’t an adult HOW OLD IS PIPPIN.

Pippin is just 29, which is why everyone calls him Pippin, it’s gonna be at least another 20 years before he can make Peregrine work. Why, how old is Boromir?

Boromir, who would rather DIE than admit to being 28 right at this moment: …. 43. 

All the others, weighing up his apparent age compared to theirs: Sure, sounds legit. 

Gandalf, who knows for certain, does not say anything because he is absolutely certain that telling Pippin that he’s older than Boromir will be an unmitigated disaster. 

[tolkiencravt]

Okay, hear me out. Tom Bombadil was one of the Vala.

He wore The Ring, and was completely unswayed by its power. Gandalf feared the influence of The Ring, to the point he would not carry it to Mordor.

I think Tom Bombadil may actually be Aulë, under an assumed name. Though it may not fit exactly. Though it does make sense that Mairon’s ring didn’t corrupt him, he taught him everything he knows.

He may have “fallen for” Yavanna, and possibly ran away with her to Middle Earth (conjecture, at best) causing him to take on the person of Tom Bombadil.

Of course, these are just the musings of a drunken madman.

[plainoldsamvimes-deactivated202]

This popped up again on reddit today, and I realized I'd never posted it here. Possibly Sir Terry's best interview response, ever.

[admiralexclipse]

alright im gonna say it :/  big and defined noses are extremely fucking good and can easily center facial shape and add interest to a face the way a button nose cannot. and if you do not agree you are firstly my enemy and secondly a coward 

[tolkiencravt]

Truth

[tolkiencravt]

It’s so Eurocentric to associate horses with the Wild West, and the plains tribes. Horses are only on this continent because they were introduced. The plains peoples had horses for less than 100 years.

[tolkiencravt]

Do nudists put their babies in diapers, or do they just walk around in filth all the time?

[tolkiencravt]

You ever get just fucking tired of being the only one to reach out? Like, yes, you have three kids, and another one on the way, and you’re homeschooling them right now. Or yes, you’re doing your master’s or whatever, but we used to talk every day. Now I’m the only one who reaches out. The fuck?

Adulthood is fucking shitty.

[tolkiencravt]

So the hotel that inspired The Shining is in Colorado, up in the mountains. The original name for the Rockie Mountains was The Shining Mountains. Is that why it’s called The Shining?