zenosanalytic:

purified-zone:

booktolkien:

scribefindegil:

fredgolds:

tbh nothing is weirder to me than manly grimdark dudebro lord of the rings bc it’s just??? the epitome of light and love to me???? no narrative embodies hope and gentleness and healing like lotr does why must you insist on talking to me about badass aragorn vs. useless frodo. that’s not the point brad

I feel like this is also why so many of the post-LOTR Tolkien ripoffs are so terrible! It’s people pulling from Tolkien when they fundamentally don’t understand what makes Tolkien work. You get all these stories written by people who don’t think Frodo was worthy of his plotline and so they give it to their Aragorn expy instead, and it’s dull and boring and totally lacks the themes and the heart that make LOTR an important, enduring story.

#lord of the rings is about beauty and love and good and hope and gentleness in the face of overwhelming sadness and darkness#less about the battlefields and more about frodo and Sam holding hands through Shelob’s lair#and Galadriel’s star-glass in the darkness of mordor#overwhelmingly the point is beauty and love#even though those things are tinged in sadness#the reason I can never get into any other fantasy stories is because they focus on the battles and the hardship#and not about the beauty and the love and the sadness#‘I will not say do not weep for not all tears are an evil’ (tags from @greyacedipperpines)

hey @LEGO take some fucking notes next time you make a halfassed grey and brown adaptation of a beloved franchise that people have been asking for years

I really like @greyacedipperpines tagcomment here; I mean all the comments are good, but the bit about beauty is one I think some people miss. One of the most persistent complaints I see about LotR and the Hobbit is all the ink Tolkien spends describing the world, food/the feeling of eating, objects, ect. What those complaints don’t get is that those descriptions of all the beauty and simple joy to be found in the world, even in the midst of hardship and strife, are central to the story’s message.

smallspaceplant:

also can we talk about the height difference between jack and bitty? and how much jack would LOVE that?? like jack is all tall lines and hard planes, but bitty is small, soft curves next to him and he doesn’t understand how this sweet southern boy isn’t put off by his sharp edges, like how can he be so kind when Jack is so…much? And he thinks about it sometimes at night when his chest is pressed against bitty’s back, and his breath comes quicker and his vision blurs a little, but then bitty sighs and presses into his chest and jack’s heartbeat calms and he can breathe again, so he slings his arm over bitty’s side and kisses his neck and remembers it’s not up to him how much other people love him. and he’s happy.

lostsometime:

penfairy:

mentallybrokengay:

penfairy:

Can I be honest, I think if we went back in time and told that “MYRRH-DER” “*gasp* Judas! No!” joke to a group of medieval peasants they would completely and utterly lose their shit. They would be grabbing each other and crying with laughter. idk I just love the thought of a joke created through a modern, 21st century medium being accessible and enjoyable for devout practising Catholics hundreds of years ago

You’d be burned as a heretic, but sure, imagine they’d laugh.

No, you really wouldn’t.

When I wrote this post I specifically had in mind the liturgical plays enjoyed by medieval folks, especially from the 14th century onwards. These plays were once performed at liturgies, in Latin, under the direction of the priest or bishop, but later became plays that were enjoyed on the village green, recited in English, and performed and produced by players. Gradually, more and more comedic and farcical elements crept into the plays, because that’s what audiences loved and demanded.

They would tell the lives of saints and Bible stories such as the Fall of Man, Noah’s Ark and the Nativity. Because plays were enjoyed at carnivals and because religious spirit and merrymaking aren’t incompatible, certain characters became humorous and stereotyped. For example, Noah’s wife was a shrew who would smack her husband to get him into the ark, Herod was a ludicrous, blustering tyrant and poor old Joseph was particularly derided and used as comic relief, especially in the Nativity plays. Apparently, being cuckolded by God was not the way to appeal to a medieval man, though he would gain respect after the Reformation.

In the context that medieval peasants watched and loved ribald and slightly irreverent liturgical plays, something that would later evolve into the English stage as we know it in Shakespeare, it is entirely accurate and harmless to think that during a Nativity play the last wise man might say “I bring thee myrr…” and after Jospeh has thanked him, he would unmask to reveal his red hair (sorry guys Judas was ginger) and exclaim “MYRR-DRE!” causing Joseph to gasp and cry “JUDAS!! NAY!!” and probably trip over himself falling backwards, to the unparalleled surprise and delight of the devout medieval peasants who, guess what, still have a damn sense of humour.

i read some medieval mystery plays this semester. there’s one where mary, having pregnancy cravings, is like “oh, husband, won’t you go get me some cherries from that tree there?”

and joseph basically says “eh, that tree is really tall and I don’t want to. how about you ask the guy that got you knocked up to get you the cherries?”

and the tree ~miraculously bends down~~ so she can eat them

and joseph is like “well shit”

girlsuggestion:

you’re allowed to say “no”. you’re allowed to say “i’m not comfortable with this”. you’re allowed to say “please leave”. you’re allowed to say “no, i don’t want to talk to you”. anyone who acts like they’re entitled to your body, time or attention thinks they somehow own you. and they really don’t.

ten-and-donna:

broliloquy:

protect-lgbtqia-kids:

eggcup:

run-up-the-sail:

pisshets:

If you add two pounds of sugar to literally one ton of concrete it will ruin the concrete and make it unable to set properly which is good to know if you wanna resist something being built, French anarchists used this to resist prison construction in the 80s

I’m just gonna go ahead and reblog this for purely educational purposes.

added bonus is that concrete now taste good

Sugar does not really do that.

What you need is citric acid (you get that to get the hard water residues out of your pots/water boiler/washing machine), looks like sugar granules.

Or concentrated vinegar.

Cement needs a high ph to bind properly.
So if you add acid, it won’t properly set and/or needs 3-4 times longer.

Speaking as someone who works in the concrete forming industry: the easiest way to severely fuck up any large concrete pour is to delay it at the wrong moment.

If someone is trying to build a huge fuckoff concrete thing – say, for instance, a giant wall – they’re going to need an obscene quantity of concrete, and that’s all going to have to be transported there from the nearest mixing plant. This means they’ll have multiple trucks coming by to decant concrete in consecutive pours while the workers place it and vibrate it to ensure it all intermixes and sets properly, forming a monolithic mass. If one pour is allowed to set before the next one is added, you get a big, ugly, possibly structurally unsound gap between the two called a “cold joint.” A bad enough cold joint can completely fuck your whole project because the next engineer or inspector who sets foot on that site is going to take one look at that motherfucker and immediately embark on a quest for blood vengeance. You will literally have to cut that whole section of wall out, slap some dowels in the nearest structurally sound bits, and re-form and pour the offending segment from scratch, which represents a fortune in cost overruns and will make everyone involved very upset. This is an especially bad problem in hot climates, because the concrete curing process is exothermic – that stuff sets much faster when it’s really hot out, and its 28-day compressive strength tends to be poorer as well.

So if, hypothetically speaking, you wanted to completely shit up a wannabe dictator’s enormous unfeasible poured concrete vanity project, you could literally just randomly hassle and delay every concrete truck on its way there. Dude’s gonna end up with a giant worthless pile of shitty crumbling concrete and exposed reinforcing steel, and an army of pissed-off contractors to boot.

reblogging for purely educational purposes nothing more