Christmas As A Cultural Icon Is Starting To Get Really Dystopian In A Climate Sense, December Has Historically

a writing competition i was going to participate in again this year has announced that they now allow AI generated content to be submitted

their reasoning being that "we couldn't ban it even if we wanted to, every writer already uses it anyway"

"Every writer"?

come on

wikipedia no longer being anywhere near the top of search results when looking up anything feels eviscerating

are you uncomfortable from your hands being dry? if you apply lotion, you can instead be uncomfortable with how greasy they are now. Subscribe for more tips!

One of the things that’s really struck me while rereading the Lord of the Rings–knowing much more about Tolkien than I did the last time I read it–is how individual a story it is.

We tend to think of it as a genre story now, I think–because it’s so good, and so unprecedented, that Tolkien accidentally inspired a whole new fantasy culture, which is kind of hilarious. Wanting to “write like Tolkien,” I think, is generally seen as “writing an Epic Fantasy Universe with invented races and geography and history and languages, world-saving quests and dragons and kings.” But… But…

Here’s the thing. I don’t think those elements are at all what make The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings so good. Because I’m realizing, as I did not realize when I was a kid, that Tolkien didn’t use those elements because they’re somehow inherently better than other things. He used them purely because they were what he liked and what he knew.

The Shire exists because he was an Englishman who partially grew up in, and loved, the British countryside, and Hobbits are born out of his very English, very traditionalist values. Tom Bombadil was one of his kids’ toys that he had already invented stories about and then incorporated into Middle-Earth. He wrote about elves and dwarves because he knew elves and dwarves from the old literature/mythology that he’d made his career. The Rohirrim are an expression of the ancient cultures he studied. There are a half-dozen invented languages in Middle-Earth because he was a linguist. The themes of war and loss and corruption were important to him, and were things he knew intimately, because of the point in history during which he lived; and all the morality of the stories, the grace and humility and hope-in-despair, was an expression of his Catholic faith. 

J. R. R. Tolkien created an incredible, beautiful, unparalleled world not specifically by writing about elves and dwarves and linguistics, but by embracing all of his strengths and loves and all the things he best understood, and writing about them with all of his skill and talent. The fact that those things happened to be elves and dwarves and linguistics is what makes Middle-Earth Middle-Earth; but it is not what makes Middle-Earth good.

What makes it good is that every element that went into it was an element J. R. R. Tolkien knew and loved and understood. He brought it out of his scholarship and hobbies and life experience and ideals, and he wrote the story no one else could have written… And did it so well that other people have been trying to write it ever since.

So… I think, if we really want to write like Tolkien (as I do), we shouldn’t specifically be trying to write like linguists, or historical experts, or veterans, or or or… We should try to write like people who’ve gathered all their favorite and most important things together, and are playing with the stuff those things are made of just for the joy of it. We need to write like ourselves.

No one is discrediting the student protests. I myself am a student who is partaking in largely student-coordinated protests, drives, campaigns… but I also understand that we are largely missing the point if coverage of these protests overshadows what they are actually protesting for—the atrocities committed on Palestinians every single day. As the western buzz around this genocide gets more and more coverage, the coverage of the genocide itself sharply declines. It’s true and I see it every single day. Things are not being reported with the precision and diligence with which they should be.

Gosh I wish motorcycles weren’t death machines they look so fun

reblog if the first musical you listened to was not Hamilton

The Titan’s Curse

It's established that Aaron and Andrew hardly speak to each other and their relationship is strained to say the least.

And in retrospect, it makes the twin-switch at the beginning of The Foxhole Court even funnier.

Andrew telling Aaron;

"I'm going to pick the new guy up from the airport, but we're going to pretend I'm you. We're dressing the same today, all black, long sleeves - yeah, I know it's summer, suck it up and deal with it. I'm going to go off my meds so I can drive. Be waiting for us out front and we'll switch back when he's distracted getting his bags out of the trunk."

Aaron; with doomed acceptance that life is weird anyway and has no energy to argue much less care;

"Sure."

Today, Jordan airdropped food for Gaza. Most of it landed in the sea as fisherman went by boat to grab the bags. The food was sealed and everything was packed tightly for the possibility of it dropping in the sea so the food was edible but this is not enough. 4 planes for 2.1 million people is not enough. We need a ceasefire now and for the thousands of trucks that are blocked at the border to enter before this catastrophe continues to take lives.