Cries In Writer

Turin and Beleg meeting again at the end of the world

Okay I think I know what it is. Jee is like an eagle. Totally stunning from side view. Derpy from front. It's the shape of his hair and nose, I think????

well… you are right! but… this is not a nice thing to say to our lieutenant and poor hawky!

This time of year is always very nostalgic for me bc I used to be the Token Gentile at an office and every few months there'd be a Jewish holiday and my friend would be like "Hey, I need you to do Gentile things for us" and I'd be like hell yes dude. Gentile Things often meant I'd sign things in exchange for a few dollars on venmo but Pesach was a special time for me because it meant everyone gave me boxes of pasta, cereal, and other baked goods. The first time my friends were like "Hey for reasons we won't bother getting into we're going to give you all of our bread" I was like, it is a powerful responsibility but as an Ally I cannot refuse. Best time of the year, frankly

AITA for trying to get back at someone who double-crossed me?

I (ageless, existed before time, F) had a deal with a skeevy guy (also ageless, though not as much as me, M), and it went sour. I want to preface this by saying that none of what I did was technically illegal, just morally questionable if you're of a certain disposition- I most definitely wasn't what anyone had in mind when writing laws. And a girl has to eat.

Anyway, I'll back it up for context. He'd been formerly estranged from his family (also ageless) who moved across the ocean to make a nice gated community after he wrecked their first home and made his own dark abode there, which they were fine with until Children entered the equation. Not my deal, personally, but to each their own. In fairness, that lot are pretty caring (gross), so it makes sense that they'd go far for these kids, saying he'd be a bad influence. Not my business, either, but I will say that they were right.

He reunited with them after they dragged him to their place, and said that he was sorry, which they accepted and let him have free run of it. This is when he contacted me and asked if I'd help him do a job, and he promised me anything I wanted in return. I didn't take him at his word, of course, but even what I'd be able to get on my own would have been a sweet deal. His sister-in-law (selfish) has these two insane trees, that only grow there, and I wanted to get my hands on them. I'm a fiend for fruit, and syrup, you see, but there was no way for me to get in alone. I'd had my eye on the place for a while, and I knew I needed help to get in. So I agreed to be a distraction while he did his thing.

I held up my part of the deal; I was what some might call hangry, and none of his useless family managed to stop me. I marched right up to those trees and had myself a perfect fruit course. Meat and wine provided by the kids who'd thought they could stop me, it was a full charcuterie. They saw my side of it eventually. Anyway, after all that, I was bloated but still hungry- you try starving for millennia and see how you like it-, but it was time to make our escape, and for me to get my payment. The guy shows up at the rendezvous spot and we get away clean. Turns out he'd gotten what he wanted, and offered me payment from that. The usual, a bunch of gemstones, which I take for myself as a snack, and then three beautiful jewels. Three- and when I say beautiful, I mean they're the best things I've seen in my entire life. So I told him, you know what, I'll take those as payment. To be honest, I could've gone for all three, but I figured I'd start small. And he didn't want to give it to me, which is bullshit, because he said I could have anything. Anything means anything.

Anyway, he refused and I never got them. Seriously, it was close; I almost had him beat and wrapped up for later before he called his friends to ambush me and escape like a coward. Whatever, I made him pay for that at least, he cried like a baby.

I don't feel bad about it, I think I'm in the right here, but I was telling my kids this and it's all "mom, what's wrong with you, how could you do that to him" and "mom, seriously?" and "mom, where's dad, did you eat him too?", which seems unreasonable to me. So I thought I'd ask on here.

Tl;dr- this guy tried to cheat me and I attempted to eat him, AITA?0

I may not have completed most of my responsibilities today, but I did sort through all 1000+ emails in my inbox

This Is How You Actually Take Notes In College, Bitches

it’s occurred to me that nobody fuckin knows how to take notes in classes and most advice about it is bad. What the fuck are “key words?”

So anyway here’s how I’ve gotten a’s in all my classes in college so far

I’m not gonna bother too much with telling you to take notes in class. Everyone knows that shit. But most people’s note taking skills suck ass and there are two main types of sucking ass I have observed

The first is the one where your notes look like a list of key terms and words. Sometimes they are underlined or there are dashes that connect them to other words. So if your prof was talking about Henry VIII you’d write down something like

Henry VIII

Church of England—divorce

DON’T DO THAT. Those words are gonna show up on the test, sure, but writing them down isn’t gonna help you with the test. What the fuck does any of that mean? High school is shit and your “key words” can’t help you now.

Here’s the other type of bad note taking:

It was necessary for Henry VIII to have a male heir who could succeed him, but his wife was unable to conceive a son. The Catholic Church

I stopped writing there because your professor moved on to something else. But, tbh, even if you can write fast enough to keep up with the content of the lectures (and you can’t for the entire lecture) it’s not helpful to have a solid wall of Everything That Was Covered In The Lecture, in grammatically correct complete sentences. Are you gonna read that shit again? No!

And honestly most people have like, sentences here and there that look important instead of the whole lecture. Which is also bad.

So what’s the not shitty way to take notes? It comes down to these principles:

Shorthand

Show Relationships of Things

These kind of go together

I cannot emphasize enough that you don’t need to write sentences like a normal person. Shorthand everything, and I don’t mean some fucked up studying shorthand you just came up with like “AmR” for American Revolution, I mean like...fuckin text/memespeak. Don’t write complete sentences, completely abandon formality. Abbreviate anything you would in a text message, you know what it means.

HOWEVER: You Must Show How Things Are Related To Things

To understand broad concepts you gotta understand how the things in them are related to other things.

That’s why writing down “Henry VIII” and “Church of England” isn’t gonna help you, because you’re not learning that there is a Church of England.

Did Henry VIII burn the Church of England? Cheat on his wife with it? Who knows? Definitely not you.

This is why you have to connect stuff like

Catholic Church says no divorce

Henry VIII—starts Church of England

But ya know you can make that more memorable AND more clearly show how one thing caused the other

Henry VIII: divorce >:)

Catholic Church: no

Henry VIII: fuk u *church of england*

I’m completely dead serious about this, this kind of slang is very good at indicating exactly how things relate to things in zero time and you know exactly what it means and you’ll remember it

But furthermore

You have to come up with shorthand to quickly indicate how things are related. Say you write down the definitions of two terms for like, opposing theories on government in class. That’s great but you’re leaving it to yourself to work out the opposing part later from what you write, and your brain’s a flaky bitch.

Like part of what you’re doing it giving yourself help with HOW to study your notes later.

So like. Do something like write a jagged line in between the definitions, indicating conflict. Write “OTOH” or “HOWEVER” in between in big fuckin letters. Writing down “Catholic Church” and what that is and “Church of England” and what that is, is fine. But like, if the main theme is the contrast between the two, “Catholic Church HOWEVER Church of England” immediately tells you the basicest basics. It’s like a tiny outline, telling you what to expect. Sure, you can figure it out reading your notes but I’m telling you how to write skimmable notes that you can glean stuff from even when you’re half spaced out and shit, okay?

Same thing for like, dates and sequences and cause-and-effect and stuff. Even if you’ve got the dates down...be sure to put arrows or something so even at a glance you’ve got basically what’s going on.

Also i know it feels like wasting paper but DONT scrunch all your notes together into small space on the paper. That lil dialogue between Henry and the Church of England is spread out over 3 lines which means if you have ADHD like me you can actually fuckin read it. Turn things into bullet lists. Indent things with little arrows to show things leading to things. If there’s a clear move to a new topic, new page. If you’re actually filling up the paper all the way that shits hard to read and it’s even harder to pick out the Big Important Stuff.

Last word of advice: If you end up like writing down two things and can’t tell what they’re for or how they’re related to each other...ASK QUESTIONS. Like “I’m sorry can you explain how the Church of England is related to the Catholic Church? I didn’t quite catch that.” If talking in class makes you feel like you might be percieved badly, you can frame it like a Nerd Question “So, what kind of relationship would you say the Church of England and the Catholic Church had?” or just play it off like you didn’t hear it like “I’m sorry, what was that last thing you said about the Church of England and the Catholic Church?”

Or just make a mark on your notes to remind yourself that you need more info and to go to your prof’s office to ask questions. I would really not be nervous about that, professors normally really like it when students show that they really want to succeed in the class and that they care. Unless they’re like, a complete dickhead, in which case, fuck what they think, right? You’re gonna ask questions and it’s their problem because you’re essentially paying them for your presence in the class.

So...yeah.

theory: Aredhel was the most skilled among the Noldor at spells of concealment

support:

she was particularly friends with Celegorm, so it's reasonable to conclude that she, too, was a hunter. stealth is a valuable skill for a hunter.

why did a woman who grew so impatient with Gondolin that she badgered her brother for years into letting her leave, and then slipped away from the escort he insisted upon, even move to such a secret city in the first place? Because she's the one who helped hide it in the first place

seriously, someone in the building of Gondolin must've been an expert at concealment spells. Even with Ulmo's blessing, you simply can't build and move en masse to an entire city without anyone finding out where it is without serious juju. why not Aredhel?

Turgon let his sister leave Gondolin on vacation when he never let anyone else go not out of weakness to the pleas of family, but because he knew that if Aredhel didn't want Morgoth or his spies to see or track her, they fucking wouldn't see or track her - and if they could, Gondolin's hope of secrecy was lost anyway.

alas that Eol was even better at it than she was (maybe this intrigued her at first. maybe there was delighted hide-and-seek beneath the dark trees before there was only hiding)

alas that she didn't have time to teach Maeglin all she knew

Ko-if link is on my page

As is my commission info

There’s some really disturbing stuff in The Nature of Middle-earth; I’m not sure whether these ideas were some of the ones Tolkien considered for how orcs were created, or if he saw them as something different, but he’s provided plenty of fodder for darkfic writers.

…it is recorded in the histories that Morgoth, and Sauron after him, would druve out the fëa by terror, and then feed the body and make it a beast…it [would become] an animal, seeking nothing more than food by which its corporeal life may be continued, and seeking it only after the manner of beasts, as it may find it by limbs and senses.

Jirt, that’s a zombie. It’s dead, non-sapient, still moving around, and only driven by looking for food. And typically created by an evil power through evil means. You invented Middle-earth zombies.

And worse, [Morgoth or Sauron] would daunt the fëa within the body and reduce it to a stupor of horror, so that it was impotent; and then nourish the body foully, so that it became bestial, to the horror and torment of the fëa.

This does seem like a mechanism for the creation of orcs. Morgoth takes an elf, overpowers the fëa so that it is no longer in control of the body, and then, well, the implication is that he feeds the body the flesh of elves or men to further torment the fëa. In the short term, the hröa is basically a beast under Morgoth’s control; over time, the fëa might become more active, but horrified, sickened, and twisted by the nature of the hröa and the purposes for which it has been used. It is evil because, outside of its control, it has done and been used for horrific things that it can’t process without becoming evil.

Brr.