Valkirin

Old enough to know better. Blogging about Catholicism, writing, parenting, Lord of the Rings, Batman, and whatever else strikes my fancy

[inthemidstofbuddie]

Pippin has unfortunately figured out that if he plays with something he’s not supposed to, he gets my attention

as if he doesn’t get it enough 🙄 it’s just when i’m working and not paying attention to him bc of that work that he decides to rebel

[inthemidstofbuddie]

I AM DECEASED

[antianakin]

I've decided the only valid answer to the question of "Could another Master have trained Anakin better/saved Anakin from Falling" is Jon Antilles.

This has absolutely nothing to do with any sort of personality differences between Jon Antilles and Obi-Wan or any belief that Jon Antilles would be a better teacher or has anything in particular in common with Anakin, and everything to do with the pure rage-fueled aneurysm that being Jon Antilles's Padawan would give to Palpatine as he tries to contact Anakin and is told for the 7th time now that Anakin and his Master were just declared dead again and no one's sure if it's stuck this time.

[reconstructwriter]

#the jedi aren't even TRYING to stonewall palpatine this time#this is just normal for jon antilles and nothing changed when he took on a padawan#palpatine keeps sending his agents after anakin and somehow they keep winding up dead#and worse: before they die they manage to leave behind yet another clue as to his entire plan#he has dooku send jango after them and they discover kamino and the clone army#palpatine sends dooku instead and they discover either sifo-dyas's fate or geonosis#palpatine finally goes himself and funnily enough the last planet they were seen on was malastare#but when he arrives the dugs tell him they're pretty sure the two jedi are dead and his rage creates a massive sinkhole#and what could be in that sinkhole you ask? it's a zillo beast with a metal chair!#jon and anakin were actually just off meditating for a few weeks nearby and come back when they feel a major shockwave in the force#neither of them are particularly pleased to have to make ANOTHER call to the council about a really weird mess that just happened

[moghedien]

I feel like I need to share this because idk if Europeans are familiar with the presence of Aldi in the US, but at least especially in my area they’ve been growing a lot recently. Like Aldi bought out some local failing grocery chains where I live (Louisiana) and have opened Aldis in all these somewhat rural communities and small towns, which for the record I’m fine with

But as a result of this they are advertising a lot more in my area and also in many cases, the people in these areas have never been confronted with Aldi or any European grocery store. So the ads that Aldi is pushing out to its new US customer base feature a cowboy shopping at Aldi who is explaining to new Aldi customers how Aldi works. Like this cowboy is explaining you gotta put a quarter in the shopping cart and why there are very little name brands. A cowboy is how they want to reach their American customer base. They gave us a cowboy

[moghedien]

Here he is, the Aldi Cowboy

[sky-scribbles]

It’s Jane Austen’s 250th birthday today and I just want to yell about how much modern writing (in the English language) owes to this woman.

Jane Austen did things with stories and characters that had simply never been done before. Do you like flawed characters who grow over the course of the story? Jane Austen pioneered the art of doing that in novels. Do you like it when a story is filtered through a character’s perspective, so you can hear their voice in the narration? Say thank you to Jane Austen.

I’m going to very, very generally summarise what novels looked like when Austen started writing. The first important thing is: they were an incredibly young genre. The first English book that everyone agrees ‘this is definitely a novel, not a collection of short stories, or an allegorical fable, or a political commentary’ is Robinson Crusoe, published 1719. Austen’s first book was published in 1811. That’s less than a hundred years!

I’ve read some early English novels, and… from a modern point of view, they are messy. Plot events are often random. Characters are generally stock archetypes. Realism wasn’t much of a concern; characters get abducted, imprisoned, etc, on a regular basis.

Slowly, from about 1770 onwards, you started to get the ‘novel of manners’ – more realistic stories set in the social world of the time. Jane Austen was absolutely not the first to write books centred on young women coming of age and finding ‘Mr Right’. (Frances Burney and Maria Edgeworth are probably the best remembered of Austen's predecessors.)

And I’ve read some of these novels, and they’re… fine? I’m generalising hugely, but the characters are still very flat. The women are usually perfect, well-behaved, virtuous, etc; the only character flaw they might have is being naïve. Here’s a passage from one of Burney’s novels, describing the heroine:

Her form was elegant, her heart was liberal, her countenance announced the intelligence of her mind, her complexion varied with every emotion of her soul, and her eyes, the heralds of her speech, now beamed with understanding...

It’s a bit ridiculous, isn’t it? And of course it is! Novels were only just starting to solidify as a genre. The idea of making the characters flawed, realistic human beings had barely occurred to anyone. But Austen decided she didn’t want to write flawless protagonists. ‘Pictures of perfection you know make me sick and wicked,’ she once wrote in a letter to her niece.

It would be ludicrous to say that flawed characters or character-driven plots didn’t exist; of course they did. What are Shakespeare’s tragedies except stories driven by their protagonists fatal flaws? What makes Austen so remarkable is that she was pretty much the first person to take those themes from plays and put them into a novel instead. And so we have Emma Woodhouse, who gets the plot rolling by being self-deluding, meddlesome and conceited (I love her so much). We get Lizzy Bennet, who makes snap judgements that confirm her own biases and has to relearn how she sees everyone around her.

And then there’s Austen’s fucking groundbreaking way of filtering the narrative through a character’s perspective.

Austen was the first writer to consistently narrate in third person, while still filtering the narrative through one person’s point of view. If the protagonist makes a mistake, the narration sometimes just… doesn’t correct it. Take this bit of Emma. All the context you need is this: Emma thinks her friend Harriet is in love with someone, and they’ve just received news that the guy’s controlling aunt is dead, which would make it a lot easier for Harriet to marry him. Harriet is, in fact, not in love with said guy, so the news means nothing to her. But the narration says:

Harriet behaved extremely well on the occasion, with great self-command. Whatever she might feel of brighter hope, she betrayed nothing.

Harriet isn’t behaving with great self-command! She isn’t affected by this news at all! But what Emma thinks is reported as if it were fact. We don’t get to know what Emma doesn’t; her opinion controls the narration. I cannot stress how much this had never been done before.

Or take this part of Persuasion, where the protagonist, Anne, encounters the man she was briefly engaged to eight years ago:

Her eye half met Captain Wentworth’s; a bow, a curtsey passed; she heard his voice – he talked to Mary; said all that was right […] the room seemed full – full of persons and voices – but a few minutes ended it.

Look at how closely we are in Anne’s perspective here. She can hardly process what’s going on, so we barely see it. We don’t hear Wentworth’s speech. Time speeds up, the narration becomes a blur, just like the moment is a blur for Anne. No one had done this before!

We all love the Locked Tomb books here, right? You know how closely the narration sticks in each protagonist’s head; how the narration sounds and feels like their voice, how we don’t get to know anything they don’t know? Jane Austen pioneered that technique. What I’m saying is: we don’t get Gideon the Ninth without Pride and Prejudice.

Jane Austen was a phenomenal writer, who came up with entirely new writing techniques that authors still use, hundreds of years later. So many of the techniques we now hold up as ‘good writing’ were things she did for the first time.

Happy 250th birthday, Jane Austen. Thanks for giving us books as we know them.

__

(The examples here come from What Matters in Jane Austen by John Mullan, which is an incredible book I can't recommend enough to anyone who wants to know more about the social context around her novels.)

[syn4k]

i will give tiktok one concession and that is that it has spawned a comment that contains a phrase that i think of often at relevant moments: pack it up boys we've made a social blunder

[syn4k]

(from a video featuring someone's father/grandfather)

[dragon-in-a-fez]

is anyone else reading "pack it up boys we've made a social blunder" in the voice of the lead penguin guy from Madagascar

[awesomebutunpractical]

The first draft philosophy that has finally gotten me writing for fun isn't "worst version of story" type framing, it's "tell the story to yourself."

Your story isn't ready for polished prose, you don't know what happens yet. This doesn't make it Bad Writing, it's a different type of writing. And this ties into why I think the plotter vs pantser debate misses the mark - both detailed outlines AND make-it-up-as-you-go first drafts are ways to make up the story. This part is for you, so how you do it should be whatever is the most fun or satisfying way to tell yourself the story.

[apenitentialprayer]

Baltimore Catechism comes in handy again; have you ever been in a situation where you know someone is doing something wrong, but you're not sure to what extent you are obligated to express your concern about that action? Some guy at a party casually mentioning he takes stuff from work, a friend of a friend asks if you want a tarot reading done, etc? Well, the commentary for Q. 222 says:

We are obliged to [admonish the sinner] in the following circumstances: First. When his fault is a mortal sin. Second. When we have some authority or influence over him. Third. When there is reason to believe that our warning will make him better instead of worse.

So you're probably not obligated to tell tell a friend of a friend that you have just met that they shouldn't do tarot, but you probably are obligated to, say, express your concern to a good friend about their amount of alcohol intake. I think the third criterion is interesting, because while it can be read as a 'get get out jail' free card ("I shouldn't say anything, because they'll just double down on their pet sin"), I think it is more useful as a challenge to ask ourselves: "Is there a way that I can brooch this topic in a way in a way that is loving, and in a way that the other person can really hear what I am trying to say?"

[byjove]

It would be kind of fun to have a medical dramamedy show where people (patients and people in the medical field) could submit their craziest experiences with the medical system and those plotlines and patient stories could be dramatized and woven into a cohesive narrative with any additional profits from the show going to pay off medical debt.

[byjove]

Plotline A: Patient is suffering from a near fatal case of hypothermia after passing out in the snow drunk and laying there all night until his 13 year old nephew discovered him in the morning, said 13 year old managed to transport his druncle to the hospital on a snowmobile but the rest of the family cannot make it there due to road conditions.

Plotline B: A live rat fell through the ceiling halfway through an emergency appendectomy, causing the surgeon to startle and rupture the patient’s appendix. Infectious disease is very interested in the situation due to the risk of zoonotic infection. The hospital’s legal department is also very interested in the situation.

[stormer-kromy]

These both happened to people you know. Didn't they

[spin-the-wheel-polls]

you have this superpower! BUT you have this side-effect

is it worth it?

yes!!

the side effect is bad but ITS WORTH IT

meh it's okay

the side effect makes it unusable/not worth it

Results/option I didn't think of

Voting ended onMay 20

[qualityblizzardcreation]

"You can talk to animals but you can't control it". I’m so confused about how you wouldn't be able to control talking to animals??? Do you just start broadcasting your thoughts to all nearby animals?? Or is it you hear whatever any nearby animals are saying all the time??

I don't really care about talking to animals.

[supreme-leader-stoat]

You know that video that's a bunch of crabs examining a diver going like "hand? hand hand hand hand hand frighten hand hand scare hand? hand hand hand"? That, but it's the ants in your walls, all the time.

[femme-foucault]

Gentiles/non-Jews of Tumblr, how well did you do in the quiz on Judaism 101 linked below?

0

1-4

5-9

10-14

15-20

21-25

26-31

32 :)

I’m Jewish/show results

Voting ended onMay 20

This is the quiz and I did not come up with it, credit goes to @iswearbyalltheflowers on this post.

Absolutely no judgment, I’m genuinely really curious and I figured more people would answer anonymously here than on the original post.

[citadelofthestars]

Where's that meme about experts in the field wildly overestimating the average person's knowledge? 😂😂 This question is in the "basic, everyone knows this" section and I've never seen any of those words before in my life, much less know what they mean. 😂😂

[tiktoks-for-dead-pope]

[simpleconvict]

[animentality]

[cadaverkeys]

genuinely one of my favourite details about Bram Stokers Dracula that isn't really transferred to the pop culture is that vampires have irridescent eyes, they appear brown at a glance, however when light is reflected on them they seem to go red!

[cadaverkeys]

another thing that pop culture latched onto is this idea that you might use a wreath of garlic bulbs to ward off a vampire, however, in the book there is a popular use of garlic blossoms rather than the bulbs. i think these are a lot prettier and way more versatile for stylisation! you could have a garlic flower crown.

[cadaverkeys]

also like the cowboy part can we please stop omitting the fact that there is a real ass cowboy in Bram Stokers Dracula and hes from real ass Texas and he has a fucking gun and he tries to fucking shoot Dracula

[cyborbs-deactivated20231020]

best thing tumblr ever did for me is the term "rotating it in my mind". it's really true that sometimes you think about something real hard but you can't tell what the thoughts are exactly. it's revolutionary stuff, i might even say

[vulpineprince]

sometimes the subject of your thoughts is just in this thing

[ablondpanda]

Ah, there it is!

The TUMBLER!

[knitmeapony]

The tumblr blorbo in the blorbo tumbler.

[gonzos-humansona]

Woman in front of me in line at the caffe nero changed my life yesterday when she ordered a prosciutto sandwich but pronounced "prosciutto" like it rhymed with mosquito. "Pruh-squee-toe."

I heard this person say "uhhhh yeah can I get a prosquito sandwich please?" and I knew I'd never be the same. Prosquito. Prosquito. Its everything to me. I haven't been able to stop saying that lmfao. This is my spinch. This is my bagel and creem cheems. This is my ranibow sprimkle.

friends and family are already tired of me going crazy over prosquito but its so special to me

[thegrayelephent]

Me when I write for 30 minutes: 1k words

Me when I write for 2 hours: 500 words

Me when I write for 4 hours: -300 words

[stimman4000]

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