Every Family Gathering And You're With Your Favorite Cousins.

Bilbo was declared dead while he was away in the Hobbit (and had to do a bunch of paperwork to get declared alive again) but there’s no indication he was formally declared dead after leaving the Shire, even though most people assumed he had died.

Therefore I posit: having a missing person declared dead in the Shire requires the consent of their next of kin. Whoever Bilbo’s next of kin was at the time of the Hobbit (possibly Otho? I’m not sure) had him declared dead at the first opportunity but Frodo refused to ever do it.

Frodo had anxious hobbit bureaucrats knocking on his door every couple of years like ‘Mr Baggins… blease… it’s been 10 years… he was eleventy-one… can we fill out his death certificate yet’ and Frodo was like ‘absolutely not’.

Early on he genuinely couldn’t bring himself too but after a while it was more that he enjoyed irritating the local magistrate’s office than anything else.

It sure is convenient that all these songs that ostensibly weren’t written in English all rhyme when translated into English, isn’t it, Mr. Tolkien?

[I. D.: a tweet by KeithPille.bsky.social on July 16, 2024 reading, “Worth thinking about how long Tolkien goes on in Return of the King about despair being a weapon, and presenting defeat as a forgone conclusion being a deliberate and effective tactic”]

Absolutely ALL text written and edited for Li's Friends, and the process for getting it on Amazon started (gotta get that sweet sweet ISBN before I finalize the copyright page). Feelin' real good and productive over here.

Final book title is "Li's Friends: Horrible Pets to Protect You From the Horrible World". (Keeping the "Book of Friends" part out because I did not go to such efforts to not get sued by the Avatar copyright holders only the get the Natsume's Book of Friends lawyers side-eyeing this project.)

Overall, the flavor text ended up being a running dialogue between Li and Other One, which works well in a short text format, and allows for small references Avatar fans will pick up on without putting in so many that Lawyers Will Care. ...Hopefully.

Next steps are finalizing the layout, which we're estimating will take until mid-October, then ordering a physical proof copy. Once I'm happy with the proof copy quality I'll pick an actual publication date and set up the preorder.

Sales will be through Amazon, barring anything exceptionally wrong with the proof copy. I'll set it up for extended distribution, which means you should theoretically be able to order through local bookstores and such as well as just online.

Physical book will be $15 USD. PDF copies are free either with the purchase of the physical book or a $10 USD donation to WIRES, the Australian wildlife rescue the community voted on. All participating artists will get the PDF for free on release day, as well.

Thank you to everyone who donated their time and talent to this project! This book is literally dedicated to you, because you deserve nice things like book dedications and pets of questionable repute. <3

Cartographic Practices of Arda: Men

[overthinking fantasy cartography series: Elves, Orcs, Dwarves, Hobbits, and Men]

o   Men might seem like the most straightforward group to analyze, but they’re not. Why should we assume that humans in Arda use the same cartographic practices that we do? For that matter, who is “we”? Cartography is not a set of objective and universally or historically standard techniques; it is not an exact science; the modern maps treated as real or correct maps are not the one true way to represent space. Tolkien’s Edain may be based on Western Europeans, but they’re still fantasy, and there’s no reason that their cartography should look like Western Europe’s

Further, Western European cartography wasn’t standardized in terms of techniques or even units of measure until early states began to want visual representations of their territory that would make them more easily taxed and managed, especially as enclosure policies took off, market forces became increasingly dominant, and controlling a standardized populace became an important goal of government

o    Western cartography is also deeply intertwined with maps as a colonial and imperialist tool, which impacted the development of mapping practices, the lands those maps reflected, and the ways in which space was imagined. I think that governing, planning military operations, maybe taxing the populace, and carrying out various expansionist programs would be the activities in Middle-earth driving cartographic development among Men, similar to Europe, but it’s not inevitable at all that the maps they make for such things would look the same. Maybe they could make maps of layered symbols rather than mimicking on-the-ground spatial relations, or paintings whose details correspond to geographic referents, or physical models of space a la Polynesian stick charts (although I do think there’s an artifacts-have-politics argument to be made about which cartographic practices are most conducive to certain uses and conceptions of space, but I digress)

o   But presuming Men do make maps in the same vein as those found in the books (though I should say I don’t take those as being real in-world maps, per se), what would they map? And how would they map it?

Starting with the Edain and the kingdoms they founded, since their influence is so centered in LOTR, I think their cartography would develop as a formal practice in Númenor, and prior to that, they might use the maps of Elven realms of which they were vassals, or might create their own spatial navigation techniques, not necessarily cartographic

Likely, considerable influence of Elvish cartography on Númenórean maps would carry over to Gondor and Arnor. While Elves might only need maps as reference for memorization, or for military strategy planning, I think Men’s reproduction of and reliance on maps would increase greatly, especially during the colonial age of Númenor and the realms they established. Cartography could become a more established discipline; populations could be managed more effectively, at least under the more competent rulers; similar to early-state-formation Europe, you could see cartography as an increasingly important tool of state 

(this is a long one, so the rest is under the cut)

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I try not to post about real life serious stuff, but there’s been a lot of… unfortunate essays written about how it is Zuko’s duty to help Azula because Iroh helped him.

I don’t know who needs to hear this, but it is never your ‘duty’ to stick around and help someone through person through their mental illness. That is redoubled when they are abusive or put you in physical danger.

I think most people realize that cartoons do not equal real life and liberties can and SHOULD be taken for fiction, but this trope seems to be gaining traction so I gotta put it out there. When the cabin pressure drops and someone you love is going through a mental breakdown, make sure you put the oxygen mask over your own face first before you help them with theirs. If you know what I mean.

This is legitimately good advice and works for almost everyone, but I do want to add that when an author believes that reworking a piece is worth it, we end up with such treasures as The Code by @adurowrites

As someone who reads favorite fanfics over and over again, it's always a treat when an author posts a new and improved version, especially when they give the reader insight into their rewriting and editing process

You don't owe it to anyone to redo your old work simply because it isn't as skillfully written as your newer stuff, but if you yourself want to engage in the endeavor and you think that it'll be good for you, go for it! And let me know afterwards because I want to read it

I know you said at one point that towards the sun was a multi year project (or at least I’m p sure u did? ig if I’m wrong just ignore this ask fjigjgjg), and I wondered something. What if by the time you get to the end, you’ve improved your writing so much that you’re not satisfied with the beginning anymore?

That is actually a normal part of writing! If you can see places to improve your old work, then you have improved since you wrote it. So like. It's a good thing when that happens.

Little edits like typos, or things like the Towards the Sun edit to remove icky blind stereotypes, are almost always worth fixing. The former is quick and easy (and bugs me on a visceral level), the latter is basic decency.

Big edits, like large plot or character arc changes, are almost never worth doing. Especially in fanfiction, where most readers aren't going to see those edits because they read the chapter months ago and ain't coming back.

AKA: I'll be leaving older stuff alone. Everyone can see the post date, if it's not as good as my newer stuff there's a pretty self-explanatory reason.

[ID: a black and white one-panel comic featuring a displeased Lobelia Sackville-Baggins in the foreground washing dishes in Bag End and Lotho Sackville-Baggins in the background moving a box. In the top left corner is written "Bag End, September 24, S. R. 1418" End ID] I love it!!! Thank you!!!

Here’s my @officialtolkiensecretsanta​ 2020 gift for @penelopes-poppies​! She wanted a character-motivation study so I was planning to write a fic but unfortunately I’m having a health problem that’s making it difficult to type comfortably for long stretches; however, she did also mention the idea of Lobelia and Lotho Sackville-Baggins rolling into Bag End after Frodo leaves for Buckland…and finding a ton of disorganization and dirty dishes to do! So here’s a little cartoon of that. (Lobelia is doing the dishes because Lotho is one of those guys who’s semi-deliberately inept at housework so mommy dearest will do it for him–poor Lobelia!)

Merry Christmas, @penelopes-poppies​!

Word Count: 1781 words

Rating: Teen And Up Audiences

Fandoms: The Silmarillion and other histories of Middle-Earth

Characters: Elrond Peredhel, Elros Tar-Minyatur, Maglor | Makalaure, Maedhros | Maitimo

Additional Tags: One-Shot Collection, Non-Linear Narrative, Elrond-centric, Maglor-centric, Character Study, Family Feels, Hurt/Comfort, Angst with a Happy Ending, Everyone Needs a Hug, let Elrond not lose anyone 2k20

Summary: Scenes of the kidnap family through Elrond and Elros’ childhood, featuring difficult questions, buried feelings, and the fragile hope of a happy ending.

Can also be read below the cut

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Your average banana is about 150 cubic cm, but that’s too complicated for the math I want to do, and once its masticated you can put it in a smaller space so let’s just call it 100 cm^3. Eating a banana gives you a radiation dose of about 0.1 microsieverts, so ten bananas, or a thousand cubic centimeters of banana in your stomach, would give you one microsievert of radiation. The thing about radiation, is that it won’t kill you very much until you’ve gotten a lot of it, the maximum amount of radiation that astronauts are allowed to take in over their life is 1 sievert, which is the same as if you ate ten million bananas. In fact, even that doesn’t represent a significant danger to them because radiation is most deadly when it happens all at once, so a dose of about 4 sieverts is potentially fatal if it happens all at once, but the highest known non-fatal dose was around 64 sieverts administered (in deeply unethical circumstances) over 21 years, so if you ate about forty million bananas all at once you’d get a potentially lethal dose, but if you had eight thousand bananas for breakfast each morning you could survive the radiation. 

Now, I’m an astrophysicist not a biologist, so people who actually know things will have to forgive me when I say that the human stomach is probably not bigger than a 10x10x10 cm cube, I mean maybe it is, we played with those 10x10x10 cm cubes in math class and they weren’t *that* big, maybe the stomach is two of those, but honestly if I misplace a factor of two here or there it really doesn’t matter too much, I’m doing far worse things to the numbers here, but you certainly shouldn’t be citing anything I’m saying to the sort of precision where a factor of two should matter, I’m being very open about how approximated this is. Human beings, on a similar note, are probably about a cubic meter or two tops, one or two million cubic centimeters, or in other words, about ten or twenty thousand eaten bananas of volume, and the stomach is probably ten or twenty. I know the human digestive system, miracle that it is, is capable of expanding somewhat to fit its contents, but the upper bound on that has to be somewhere less than the entire volume of the human body it is contained in. So if you’ve stuck with me on this exciting journey, I can now lead you directly to the point I’ve been slowly building towards, which is this: If you want to give yourself acute radiation sickness you are going to have to find a method other than eating bananas. You cannot fit enough bananas inside you at any one time to fatally poison yourself with radiation.