Me in my notes: “okay the floating island of On-Kalmoth are able to float because the pulverized bones of the great bird king were infused in to the land during the scouring of dawn before the beggining of time, while the floating islands of the windlands operate on a completely different principle due to the veins of naturally occuring none magical cavorite, which allows them to continue to float when the anti-magic eye of the fith moon is upon the world…”

Me to my players: fuck if i know it’s magic"

The eruption of the giant volcano that was non-colonialism non-genocide solution to having a continent wide mostly intact ruins full of stuff probably killed way more birds than that.

Right? How much is Barry even worth, now? Why doesn’t Nancy throw down 100m for the most important election of our lives? Fuck them.

It’s canonish. I think the elves were corrupted to orcs thing comes from a couple of different versions of Sillmarillion stories. Trolls being Ents is related to something Treebeard says, but Treebeard says they were made as a mockery of ents, not from ents. I think Tolkien talks about the idea that maybe stone trolls turn to stone in the sun bc they’re not “really” alive, they’re just cheap knock-offs because Melkor couldn’t really create without Illuvatar’s help. Whereas the dwarves are really alive because when Illuvatar found out Aule had made them Aule asked for Illuvatar’s help so they could have fea and really be living and free willed.

Orcs and goblins is a linguistic thing. I think the Sindarin word for Orc is “yrch”. The hobbit was originally written to be quite silly and approachable. I think the original edition mentioned something about riding a train to China before it was edited to be more clearly tied in to LotR. But The Hobbit uses much less Sindarin and more common english words like Goblin and Hobgoblin, but orcs and goblins are different ways of referring to the same sort of people.

Yeah, I can dig it. They look like people, just different people.

I don’t know if I’d have wanted Tolkien to have finalized his ideas about Orcs or not. Afaik he never decided exactly where they came from. I wrote a short story once set a hundred or two hunred years in to the first age. The idea was that a Man/Edain was riding out to parley with an orc tribe, and it’s been a few generations, and he sees the orcs for the first time and thinks they just look like short men, so surely the accounts of them being weird looking monsters during the War of the Ring long ago were exaggerations. And the idea I had was that with the last Dark Lord and follower of Morgoth defeated the power of evil that held the orcs had waned to nothing and they had gradually become man-like or elf-like, and in time were so indistinguishable from Men/Edain that they all started banging and the two species or races or whatever merged in to each other.

Right? It’d be fun to go all around the world comparing the uniforms different cultures use for wrestling. Pretty much every culture has some kind of wrestling tradition and they’ve all got their variation on booty shorts or unitards.

rare Br*tish win

This got me thinking about the depiction of Germans as “Huns” by the Brits in WWI. The Brits racializing Germans as asiatic “Huns” is certainly a head scratcher. It’s got me wondering what Tolkien thought Mongolians looked like in the context of the ignorance and racism of the 40s-70s. I can’t imagine he knew very many Mongolians, so I imagine he was mostly familiar with contemporary racist yellow-peril propaganda. but then it’s Tolkien so who knows, guy read a lot. *shrug*

It hadn’t occurred to me prior to try to unpack this within the context of then contemporary stereotypes and ignorance. Like it’s one thing to know it’s racist, but what does that actually mean? Like, what was the racial stereotype he was mired in? What was his exposure to Mongols?

Like, John Wayne kind of notoriously portrayed Chingis Khan in '56, which is as ridiculous as it sounds CW: John Wayne in, I don’t even know, yellow-face? The put him in makeup to play Chingis Khan and he looks ridiculous.

Afaik this is about as bad as he ever gets. Like, credit to the guy, his orcs aren’t actually a racial stereotype of anyone, they’re more a metaphor for industrial warfare. LotR has it’s issues; Monarchism, Hobbits as utopian yeomen farmers, all kinds of stuff, but it’s much less egregious than the stories that inspired it and the stories it inspired. Like it’s smack in the middle between Conan and Warcraft, with Conan being straight up Klan levels of racist, and then you’ve got Warcraft’s traditional depiction of trolls as Jamaican stereotypes, native american minotaurs, whatever their orcs are supposed to be.

Games Workshop did weirdly good by making their orcs British soccer hooligans.

Good god. I, uhh… oh, i twisted my ankle! Could you carry me for a bit giant wrestler man?

Was doing a bit of reading; apparently the reason the orcs in the Jackson films look all kinds of different ways, with radically different facial structures and skin colors, is Jackson was aware of this description and threw it out. Apparently the idea was that having orcs be wildly diverse in their appearance wouldn’t allow audiences to treat them as a stereotype of any race or ethnic group. Dunno if it’s true but if it is good on Jackson for seeing the problem and addressing it.

We need a commercial point of sale sabotage manual. Like we need to comb through the repair manuals for all these things, all these advertising machines, and determine how they can be disabled quickly, quietly, and with minimal evidence by the “end user”.

I’m sure someone has a patent for it. Drink verification can to put car in gear.

Something something second order simulacra of the 90s rap game.

Ohio rizz means you have the sexual charisma of someone from Ohio. Which, like, jesus chrisht kids calm down.

It’s rap beef between white children.

American Football is a de-facto relgigion. Not in any kind of sarcastic way, it is a core component of social life and holds a sacred and holy status in many rural parts of the us south and midwest. It’s the cornerstone around which the social world is arrranged. It’s far more important to them than a little traumatic brain injury.

They’ll be pie in the sky when you die? That’s a lie!

If you’re in college and pay attention to staff, faculty, and alumni event schedules there still can be.

Some of the “mexican” tex mex places in the us are charging for the basket of tortilla chips and salsa that have traditionally been brought to the table with the drinks.