hey not to be absolutely fucking morbid on main or anything but if we do reach a point where the rich try to escape extinction by fleeing earth to live on their secret mars colony or whatever my dying moments will be taking solace in the fact that a society comprised solely of the 1% of the richest people on the planet will tear itself apart in under a year
can’t wait for Fyre Fest 2 on mars
not to be overly optimistic on main but without the 1% we might stand a chance
work song by hozier is peak romance I mean “no grave can hold my body down, I’ll crawl home to her”.,, “cause my baby’s sweet as can be, she gives me toothache just from kissing me”,, “I swear I thought I dreamed her”…. bithc!!!!
The next time they tell you Americans are “happy” with their employer provided health insurance remember that that “happiness” is fueled by willful ignorance of what the alternatives are really like and fear of losing what little crappy health care they currently have.
What’s a referral?
In the US, you can’t get an appointment with a specialist doctor until you go to your normal doctor and they check you out and refer you to an expert.
They usually do this because of insurance reasons — in order for insurance to pay for a specialist, you have to get checked up by your normal doctor first, and they have to officially recommend you see someone else.
A cute woodland sprite! A mischievous boy, currently casting a spell on some mortal to tie their shoelaces together. 9/10 why is he wearing board shorts?
Oh man. Oh bro. This one is rough, from the color palette reminiscent of a Claire’s final clearance sale, to his oddly positioned hidden foot, to his vacant death stare. 1/10 give him a pair of pants.
This one is more representative of a fairy, it doesn’t convince me a tiny fey creature is living in my phone like the others. His head is not connected to his body, which is somewhat disturbing. 3/10.
This looks like Samsung saw the Apple’s Man Fairy on TV as a child before google existed and drew it in his school notebook from memory. 7/10 he did a pretty good job.
This looks like the love child of Tinker Bell and Winnie the Pooh. I don’t like to call things “childhood ruining” but if I ever do this’ll be the first. 2/10 at least give him ears.
A drastically different approach from Facebook, this is not your run of the mill sweet fairy boy. He came from a distant frozen wasteland. He has never done a good deed in his life, not once. And he wants to fucking RAGE. 10/10 I’m genuinely scared.
This is just the tooth fairy. 2/10 I have a personal grudge (my teeth were worth FAR more).
Damn. I’d let him raw me on a toadstool and the chipmunks could watch. 11/10.
One of the ballsiest things Tolkien ever did was write 473k words about some hobbits called frodo, sam, merry, and pippin and then write in the appendices that their names are actually maura, ban, kali, and razal.
This just in: Eowyn and Eomer’s names actually start with the letter “L.” [source for other nerds]
What you’ve got to understand is that everything Tolkien wrote was him pretending to merely translate ancient documents. He was writing as if the Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings were actually been written by Bilbo, Frodo, and Sam (or Bilba, Maura, and Ban) and he was just some random contemporary academic translating it all into English for us.
There are many languages in his books, but generally speaking, everything written in English in the books is a translation of the language “Westron.” Therefore any names that come from Westron, he translated. Names coming from other languages, like Sindarin, he left as they were. Why? IDK. Maybe because the stories are from a hobbit perspective and hobbits speak Westron, so he wanted the Westron parts to sound familiar and the other languages/names to remain foreign?
“But Mirkwoodest!” you cry, “The word ‘hobbit’ isn’t an English word! And the names Bilbo Baggins, Frodo Baggins, Samwise Gamgee, Peregrin Took, and Meriadoc Brandybuck” all sounds super weird and not like English at all!”
Psych! They are in English! (Or Old English, German, or Norse.) Once again you underestimate what a nerd Tolkien was. Let me break it down:
In Westron, hobbits are actually called “kuduk,” which means “hole-dweller,” so for an English translation, Tolkien called them “hobbits” which is a modernization of the Old English word “holbytla” which comes from “Hol” (hole) and “Bytla”(builder).
“Maura” is a Westron name which means “Wise.” Weirdly enough, “Frodo” is an actual Proto-Germanic name that actual people used to have and it means the same thing.
“Razanur” means “Traveler” or “Stranger” which is also the meaning of the word “Peregrin(e)” This one is a twofer because “Razar” means “a small red apple” and in English so does “Pippin.”
“Kalimac” apparently is a meaningless name in Westron, but the shortened form “Kali” means “happy,” so Jirt decided his nickname would be “Merry” and chose the really obscure ancient Celtic name “Meriodoc” to match.
Jirt chose to leave “Bilba” almost exactly the same in English, but he changed the ending to an “O” because in Westron names ending in “a” are masculine.
I’m not going to go on and talk about the last names but those all have special meanings too (except Tûk, which is too iconic to change more than the spelling of, apparently).
The Rohirrim were also Westron speakers first and foremost, so their names are also “translations” into Old English and Proto-Germanic words, i.e. “Eowyn” is a combination of “Eoh” (horse) and “Wynn” (joy/bliss).
“Rohirrim/Rohan” are Sindarin words, but in the books, they call themselves the “Éothéod” which is an Old English/Norse combo that means “horse people.” Tolkien tells us in the “Peoples of Middle Earth” that the actual Westron for “Éothéod” is Lohtûr, which means that Eowyn and Eomer’s names, which come from the same root word, must also start with the letter L.
The names of all the elves, dwarves, Dunedain, and men from Gondor are not English translations, since they come from root words other than Westron.
The takeaway from this is that when a guy whose first real job was researching the history and etymology of words of Germanic origin beginning with the letter “W” writes a book, you can expect this kind of tomfoolery.
Notes: Sorry I said “Razal” instead of “Razar” in my original post I’m a fraud.
Most of the dwarves’ names are actually from the Edda and in it are also names of dwarves.
I did wonder while writing this post if that means the Dwarves’ names are also “translations” or if it’s just Tolkien stealing from Norse mythology because he thought the names sounded cool. Of course, every dwarf also has a secret Khûzdul name, but that’s not a matter of translation, just a matter of Dwarves being shady.
god this is just the outer edge of the damn Tolkien linguistic rabbit hole too it’s a good thing I’m an idiot or this shit would keep me busy for the rest of my life
Okay look. Stephanie Meyer contributed four (4) cool things to the contemporary fantasy genre, which I shall now list here in the hopes of getting it out of my system. In descending order of importance:
1. Writing a story about a girl who wants something. Plot driven by a woman’s (non-vilified) desire. Truly dreadful execution but still a good idea, sort of a literary incarnation of the “he a little confused but he got the spirit” meme.
2. The fact that when Bella becomes a vampire she can still breathe but “there’s no relief tied to the action” which I remember verbatim because it fucking slapped. The idea of human physical sensations being partially defined by our mortality and the sensations still exist after you become undead but your experience of them is fundamentally different because you no longer need any of it? Extremely cool. The closest Meyer came to taking an interesting stance on vampires being dead.
3. Werewolves are immortal but they can literally stop whenever they want. That shit’s hilarious. Curse of immortality who.
4. The fact that vampires don’t sleep or get tired so their communally-raised baby doesn’t have a crib because she is always in someone’s arms. That was extremely cute and there’s a different, better book contained somewhere in that specific concept.
5. Depression being represented by like 6 blank chapters titled with months.
Heres the thing you gotta understand about statistics.
“Increases your chances by 80%” does not mean “there is now an 80% chance”.
If your chances were previously 10%, your chances are now 18%, not 90%.
if your chances were roughly 1%, they’re now just slightly less than 2%.
thats how that works.
Wow I don’t understand math at all
‘if you have a baby after 35, the chance of deformities goes up by 100%’ is a line I hear alot.
It goes up from .5% to 1%
I think my brain just stopped working
100% is just another way of saying twice more likely. So 100% more basically means multiply the number you do have by 2.
Imagine how many woman are scared to have kids because of that statistic
This is why I took stats instead of calc. Because I don’t build engineer bridges in my everyday life but I sure do read studies that affect how I might live my life if I misinterpret them.
bro there is nothing funner and more stupid then the concept of fantasy races in a corporate setting imagine you go in for a job interview and a tiefling is sitting at the front desk.
dwarf: pulling another all-nighter?
elf who literally doesn’t sleep: i don’t see the problem
Just because he doesn’t sleep doesn’t mean he doesn’t need “me time”. You’re not paying him for his entire life, and he’s not paying 4200 to enjoy an apartment he’s never in.
This is literally what I love to draw and imagine
Goblin in a waistcoat
That’s just one of their normal states of being
He also has a pocket watch
No he cannot read it
that’s because he chewed the face so much it’s illegible
A high-fantasy lord of the rings Elf living at work for months undetected because they sleep with their eyes open for 6 hours a week and only eat granola from the break room is a fantasy plot I need in my life
i will never recover from “joblin”
A Tiefling in legal, looking over the contracts the company has just been offered: “Look, I’ve seen more forgiving deals come out of my granddad’s office, y'know? Oh, shit, is this- yeah, I know that sigil, this is great-uncle Asmodeus’s work, I can’t hep you on this one.”
So while most rainbow capitalism is sticking rainbows on things and pretending to be an ally, Budweiser’s UK branch is giving credit to trans activists, and explaining pride flag colors.
Budweiser is an inclusionist 💞💞💞
What a weird and true thing to say! And I almost sounds like a joke but honestly I feel this tweet captures 90% of my feelings
And to actually credit Monica Helms and get the white stripe right? Like, if we are going to have companies at pride this is what I’d like to see. Professional looking marketing, credit to activists, research about the groups its marketing, and spreading further awareness.
