@renniejoy / renniejoy.tumblr.com
6 hour long fight at this year’s Tolkien Historical Society Conference about whether Middle Earth has bees, before I reminded everyone that the Rohirrim had mead halls, which means they had honey, which means there’s bees. Everyone sighed and the conference continued. This is the life of a Tolkien scholar.
It’s what he would have wanted
op why did you wait six hours
It was the extended edition of the debate
Hide and seek master
Symphonic Sculpture by Gabriel Loire is a breathtaking 18-meter tall lookout tower at the Hakone Open-Air Museum in Kanagawa, Japan. This masterpiece features a spiral staircase surrounded by stunning stained glass, creating an immersive experience. As visitors ascend, natural light filters through the colorful glass, casting mesmerizing patterns that enhance the beauty of the landscape. A perfect blend of art and architecture, this tower offers a unique perspective and is a must-see attraction for anyone visiting the museum.
Stairway
“I’ll just rest my eyes” is the biggest lie you’re going straight to snorkmimimi land
“I’m going to sleep” is the biggest lie I’m going to stare at my ceiling for the next three hours
rich people are so boring. Private jets for intra-US travel? if i was a multimillionaire I’d have my own old timey gilded train car and take my sweet ass time going everywhere. sorry, you won’t see my ass for 5-7 business days while I’m going through the mountains with no cell service but a well paid private chef that specializes in gluten free cuisine, bye
the primary benefit of being a Dark Knight is that you can get away with all kinds of forbidden magic that people would normally be hunted down for. the worst you'll get is some disapproving stares
the primary drawback is that evil princesses, wicked sorceresses, etc. don't often go in for a knight that comes pre-corrupted. so if you ever want to get a new girlfriend you have to do some Cecil Finalfantasy shit just so you can get fucked up again.
You're setting your sights too high. Find some meek, bookish commoner girl and I GUARANTEE she'll be all over you and your forbidden magic.
you say that now but how would I feel after she finally succumbs to the darkness. after she becomes more powerful than I could have ever imagined, wielding powers that have long been beyond my reach. after I see her eyes grow colder and sharper with every passing day, and I, the vessel by which she will achieve her dark ambitio I am going to go into my bedroom and lock the door real quick don't worry about it.
Okay. Say you ask a small child to draw you a house, and they come up with something like this:
For the purposes of this analogy the child is shit at colouring in, because I only wanted to give the general idea.
So, we can all agree that the child who draws a house probably isn't trying to communicate anything in particular other than “look at this cool house I drew”, right?
Cool.
So… Why is it seemingly in the middle of nowhere, when most children live in houses with neighbours?
Why is the main body a square and the roof a solid triangle when that doesn't look like any house that has ever been built anywhere?
Why does it have a wood-burning stove with smoke actively coming out of the chimney, even though the sun indicates warm weather?
Why is the sun smiling? Why is it yellow?
Answer: because the child has seen picture books, and films, and the drawings of other children, and has on some level absorbed that this is what a house is meant to look like.
Face to face, the child almost certainly wouldn't know where to begin communicating “yellow is a colour culturally associated with happiness and warmth, and two dots accompanied by a curved line symbolically represent a smiling human face, so I have combined these attributes with the sun to convey that it is a very warm and pleasant day”.
Or “historically most houses in my country used fire for heat and cooking, and even though this is no longer the case for the majority of households, most media portrayals of houses are inspired by other, older, media portrayals and therefore include the chimney. I have chosen to follow this trend.”
Or even, “I have poor motor control because of my age, and large, 2 dimensional shapes are easier to draw than anything involving detail and perspective”.
Yet this is all information that you can pick up from detailed study of the house drawing.
Ultimately, it's not about what the writer intended. That's what the whole death of the author thing means.
If you think of literature like as a conversation, then think of all the analysis stuff that your English teacher keeps trying to get you to look at as like body language. It's the stuff that the other person doesn't even necessarily mean to communicate, but that can tell you a hell of a lot about what they mean.
Also, a poem written by a poet who got high is still a poem written by a poet.
People love to say dismissive bullshit like, "oh, that's just the drugs talking" but actually, drugs can't fucking talk! It is always the human being doing the talking regardless of how intoxicated they are. The drugs are not creating the poetry. The poet's mind is creating the poetry. A person doesn't stop being a person just because they took something.
also if it got published they probably still liked it sober
Though I will admit, English teachers do be looking like that sometimes: Explaining aspects of a text that exist beyond its surface level analysizable components to a person who hasn't bought into literary analysis of any non-literalist flavor does make ya seem somethin conspiratorial.
And talking about the same material, year after year, you'll start takin' short-cuts in your explainations, which only makes the logical analysis seem more dubious.
I'm an electrical engineer and for the longest time I was saying that electricity and electronics isn't magic, but think about it.
You literally have to collect rare stones from remote locations, put them into specific formations to work. All of this gets written down in symbols which don't make sense to the uninformed. It gets powered by energy which can not be seen in most cases.
Like what else do you want. What's your standard for calling something magic.
"It doesn't stop being magic just because you know how it works."
Terry Pratchett, The Wee Free Men (Discworld #30)
Some individuals with AD/HD, especially without hyperactivity, have an activation problem as described by Thomas Brown, Ph.D. in his article AD/HD without Hyperactivity (1993). Rather than a deficit of attention, this means that individuals can’t deploy attention, direct it, or put it in the right place at the right time. He explains that adults who do not have hyperactivity often have severe difficulty activating enough to start a task and sustaining the energy to complete it. This is especially true for low-interest activities. Often it means that they can’t think of what to do so they might not be able to act at all, or, as Kate Kelly and Peggy Ramundo say in You Mean I’m Not Lazy, Stupid or Crazy?!, they might experience a “paralysis of will” (pg. 65). “The clothes from my trip—a month ago—are just still lying in a heap in the suitcase.” “I spend a lot of time in bed watching TV but my mind isn’t watching TV. I’m thinking about what I should be doing, but I don’t have the energy to do it.”
- Sari Solden, Women With Attention-Deficit Disorder
thank you to all of the music artists that live in my phone and sing songs whenever i want them to
The people who consider abortion to be murder would be so upset to learn that throughout most of human history, the alternative to abortion and birth control was actually infanticide and not just having the baby and raising it. Especially in times of immense stress and reduced resources. Murdering babies was a thing humans and our ancestors did for thousands of years to ensure the survival of the species. Abortion and birth control has enabled us to live in a much gentler society.
tired of posts that are like "why should i go to therapy when the reason i'm upset is because of SOCIETY" and it's like
yeah. have you ever heard of a locus of control. you don't have control over Society but you do have control over your reaction to it
this is a really important thing. maybe you can't make the problem go away, but maybe you can change how you deal with the problem.
This is also very true of more localized situational depression. A few years back I had no job and a horrible living situation and while getting on the right dosage of meds obviously didn't fix those issues in and of itself, it did make me a lot better equipped to deal with it and eventually get out, because I felt less hopeless and more energetic. If you've convinced yourself that the only way to fix your problems is to completely restructure society, it makes you feel a lot less motivated to participate in either fixing your specific problems or restructuring society.
The Corbridge Roman Lanx, The British Museum, London
The scene on the lanx depicts a shrine to Apollo, Greek god of music and health. It shows the continuing influence of classical mythology even as late as the 4th century CE, when Christian imagery was becoming increasingly popular.
Although the lanx may have been used to serve food, it was probably for display mainly, perhaps to show that the wealthy owner was educated and well-read. It is even possible that the design on the lanx was intended to ensure that Greek and Roman myths continued to be understood.
from your friendly neighborhood librarian:
all books are good books. you are not a “lesser reader” if you only read manga or comic books or a “better reader” for reading academic heavy texts.
reading is reading no matter what it is, be it a graphic novel, a romance, a classic, an audiobook, a picture book, a cookbook, fanfiction, fucking whatever, read what makes you happy
reading is supposed to be fun and don’t let elitism sap any joy out of it
Audio books are also still reading, and don’t let the ableism tell you otherwise
“Babel” by Cildo Meireles (2001)
Tags courtesy of @a-kind-of-merry-war that really explain this artwork!
this doesn’t do it justice!!! look at this beast! i went to see it a year ago and its a phenomenal experience, 10/10!!
it lights up and everything, all the different parts are making noises - like there’s classical music AND rock music layering over each other, old talk shows and just radio static! god i love babel so much!
and what’s even better is that the higher up you go, the more modern the machines get - like it’s old radios at the bottom and iphones/ipods at the top and they ALL still make noise like can you IMAGINE
anyway yeah if you get a chance to see it definitely go see it!
How much is a ticket to the Tate Modern
Free! They charge for special exhibits, but this is part of the general collection. Level 4, east half, I think.
