Left: AI filter is off Right: AI filter is on

Another tip for DDG - if you want to permanently get rid of DDG's AI features (which you can turn off in settings, but only temporarily) - for now you can just use noai.duckduckgo.com as your search engine. Works as advertised in the name.

i dont think any of you understand how important i am to the plot

you can kill me off but everyone will stop watching

It’s easy to forget JRR Tolkien was a fairly prolific academic translator with an interest in early medieval literature and philology. It’s so inspiring that he found time to write The Hobbit while fighting for his life over Beowulf.

JRR Tolkien’s introductory notes for Sir Gawain and the Green Knight are like “This is a superb little poem. I really enjoy the author’s ability to weave existing narratives within folklore into one cohesive tale. This was fun!” and his lectures and notes on Beowulf are lowkey like “Translating and analyzing this was my Waterloo. I have been looking at it for 40 years. I am Sisyphus and this poem is my burden. All of you are misinterpreting it. Me too probably. God help us all.”

To be fair, Beowulf is in a whole other language, not just from ours, but from Sir Gawain and the Green Knight's. And the state of Beowulf criticism was apparently such at the time that Tolkien had to write a seminal essay that said, essentially, "You FOOLS. You complete IDIOTS. Beowulf is a POEM. Not history or folklore, a BEAUTIFUL POEM. And it has MONSTERS IN IT. And contrary to what you might think, THE MONSTERS ARE AWESOME."

And this "Beowulf is good actually" take blew everyone's minds and was so influential in the field that every medievalist STILL reads it in grad school, lest we ever forget that Beowulf is a beautiful poem with monsters in it, and the monsters are awesome.

buck on every june 1st since 2019 was posting a pic of him and eddie and chris on his instagram story and he would write "happy pride month! 🏳️‍🌈 #ally #loveislove" and it would confuse every single person who saw it in different ways. a bunch of people would always reply "congratulations!" and he would say "thanks you too!" to everyone because he thought they were just congratulating his allyship

I can't express what it is exactly but there is something about the energy of this sign that says it is lying. not just lying but lying in a plot significant way. like this feels like a sign they would put in a video game as part of the environmental storytelling about how you're in a dystopian future where you can't trust anything.

I can't express what it is exactly but there is something about the energy of this sign that says it is lying. not just lying but lying in a plot significant way. like this feels like a sign they would put in a video game as part of the environmental storytelling about how you're in a dystopian future where you can't trust anything.

Everyone: Yeah it's super convenient how the dragons have a human form. For sex and stuff.

Sol: ...you're fucking them in human form?

FOURTH ROUND: 8th Tilt

Xenk Yendar, Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves (2023) VS. Sir Lancelot, BBC’s Merlin (2008-2012)

Propaganda

Xenk Yendar, Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves (2023) Portrayed by: Regé-Jean Page Defeated Opponents: - Eamon Valda [Abdul Salis], The Wheel of Time (2021-) - Thraxus Boorman [Amar Chadha-Patel], Willow (2022) - Giuliano de Medici [Bradley James], Medici (2016-2019) - Prince Oberyn Martell [Pedro Pascal], Game of Thrones (2011-2019)

Sir Lancelot, BBC’s Merlin (2008-2012) Portrayed by: Santiago Cabrera Defeated Opponents: - Sid [Luke Youngblood], Galavant (2015-2016) - Chu Hun [Peter Ho], Double World (2020) - Sultan Alauddin Khilji [Ranveer Singh], Padmavaat (2018) - William Thatcher [Heath Ledger], A Knight’s Tale (2001)

Additional Propaganda Under the Cut

ONE DAY LEFT TO VOTE!!!

A brief moment of rationality from the bird place.

your life should not be a museum

alright everyone is being sassy but nobody has brought up the actual reason why scientists are interested in the titanic in the notes

Per wikipedia:

The Titanic was made of steel, presumably to resist corrosion (i mean. thats why boats are made of steel i assume) but even when iron/steel rusts people did not expect to find like. decomposition. bacteria are EATING the titanic.

and there's wood furniture from the titanic that isn't decaying. hell, there are wood ships at the bottom of the ocean that archaeologists study. so the expectation people have for the titanic is not that the steel would decompose at the bottom of the ocean. Even in 100 years, since there are much more ancient preserved wooden ships iirc.

(im not particularly knowledgeable about ships, i just had heard about the science going on around the titanic so i wanted to clarify that on this post for people)

The Titanic is an exceptionally weird whalefall basically.

Not a marine biologist but biologist enough to weigh in on this. The reason we have iron eating bacteria but not wood eating bacteria at the bottom of the ocean is simple. Hydrothermal vents release a cocktail of different mineral ores into the ocean. And bacteria and other organisms evolved alongside those so they evolved to digest these, like iron or other metal ores

Wood however does not exist at the bottom of the ocean since it basically never sinks down, even when logs are flushed out into the ocean they basically never end up at the ocean floor. So there's no bacteria that evolved to decompose lignin, which is already complex enough to decompose on the surface. And that's why wooden ships or the furniture on the Titanic stay intact for hundreds of years or longer.