We all know for a FACT John would rub his ranch in Arthur's face if Arthur was alive!

I’m sorry but can you imagine the impact Isaac’s death had on the rest of the gang. No one knowing what to do but watching Arthur change. Arthur losing himself, drinking constantly, going through episodes of uncontrollable rage to being emotionally vacant, where he asks Hosea (post-Bessie) if he’ll ever feel anything again. Nights where they think they can hear Arthur crying in his closed tent, and there’s an unspoken fear they could lose him. Fear that Arthur is going to die with his son, whether it’s drinking or increasingly reckless missions where it feels like he’s not trying to dodge bullets, or if one day he’s going to go off on a hunting trip and be found months later as a corpse with a gun still in his hand.

But he somehow pulls through. Recovers, or represses the grief enough to masquerade as okay. Starts smiling again.

John not understanding how devastating that grief could be until he’s holding his own son - a tiny fragile baby and knowing he already loves him too much. He doesn’t know how to be a parent, he doesn’t know how it’s possible to love something so much. He does know he could never be as strong as Arthur, because if anything happened to that tiny baby he wouldn’t be able to live. It’s terrifying, knowing something so small could destroy him. So he puts up walls: maybe it's not his baby. Still loves him. Tries to avoid Abigail and the baby. Still loves him.

He has to leave. Before that baby kills him.

More stories from hell (retail) today I was ringing up this lady and she goes oh I want to do part of this on a gift card and the rest on normal card and I go ok and then she hands me a folded piece of paper. I think oh OK it must be folded around the gift card, right? Wrong. It is a folded sheet of 8×11 printer paper with "$40" written on the inside in ballpoint pen. I go what is this. She says a gift card. I say this is not a gift card. She says yes it is. I say this is a piece of paper with "$40" written on it. She says "well it's a gift card." I say it absolutely is not. I am grinding my teeth. She says well I want to use it. I say you physically cannot do that bc it is a piece of paper. I cannot scan or swipe it. I apologize, as if this is my fault, and not because she is completely insane. I hate it here

How to join in the round for a jogless edge 🧶

Don’t forget to cast on an extra stitch!

this is going to sound like the most boomer take ever but I genuinely think increasing reliance on technology for entertainment in youth is draining creativity. it's that instant gratification which allows you to shut your brain off for a while. these kids aren't having to resort to their own creativity when bored. there's always a solution to "bored" now. BRING BACK PLAYING WOLVES UNTIL BEDTIME

'Enjoy it despite its flaws' is one thing, but Mass Effect somehow invented its own category: 'simultaneously one of the most flawed and the most well-crafted sci-fi stories I've ever experienced'. These games are incredible. They’re the worst. All the women are sexualized. All the women have deeply flawed and complex personalities without being either demonized or romanticized. The first available f/f ship seems to be written along the guidelines of 'what would a straight man find hot'. As the games go on, they effortlessly include multiple same sex romance options given just as much care and development as the the opposite sex ones. You can play as a xenophobic murderhobo asshole. You can play as someone genuinely caring but also harsh, who inspires growth and co-operation wherever you go but who makes hard choices when you have to. You can kill civilians and punch reporters and commit genocide. You can stop a generational war and mediate peace and save several species from extinction. The robots are stereotypically evil cannon fodder. The robots are deeply complex with a tragic history. Your team mates are assholes with xenophobic opinions or justifications for police brutality and genocide, or they just want excuses to Do Murder. You team mates are deeply flawed and can be urged to grow alongside you. The most important aliens are all humanoids. There are plant aliens and jellyfish aliens and insect aliens and elephant aliens and aliens who can’t share an atmosphere with us. You have to drive around countless identically boring planets with little to show for it. You get to discover hidden secrets and civilisations millions of years old and live through some of the most emotionally harrowing scenes in storytelling history. I am going absolutely insane about it.

Incomplete list of stuff that made me go apeshit reading Fellowship for the first time, medievalist edition (part II)

Part I here. Disclaimer: this is for fun!

Love that people keep stressing that they are going to the ELVES for COUNCIL. Old English names, especially among the rulers of Wessex, Northumbria, Mercia, etc, were often Elf Theme Names, one of the most famous and enduring of which is Alfred. Written the old way, Ælfræd or Ælfred (as in Alfred the Great), means Elf-Council, aka "counseled by elves". In their hearts... everyone wants to be Alfred... possibly this is only funny 2 me.

Tom Bombadil doing a training montage in the fucking magic system of Middle Earth?? He teaches Frodo to recite a poem that will summon him, Tom Bombadil, in times of need! Frodo gets kidnapped by undead wights in a barrow (like many a good young person in an Old Norse saga before him) and dutifully recites this magic poem. Frodo learned Recite Magic Poem! TOM BOMBADIL SMASHES THRU THE WALL OF THE BARROW LIKE THE KOOL-ADE MAN AND RECITES A BIGGER, STRONGER POEM??

At this point I gave up on trying to be normal about anything. As such, I'm pausing on Tom Bombadil again.

It helped (?? not psychologically) that Tom Bombadil recited something that felt a bit familiar, when he banished the wights. It's not anything like a direct translation, if indeed it bears any purposeful resemblance to the actual recorded medieval galdor called Against a Wen. Regardless, Against a Wen is an okay?? example of what a spoken word magic poem would look like, and why it's similar to what Tom Bombadil (and later Gandalf and others) do. Left screenshot is Bombadil against a barrow-wight. Right is Against a Wen, in English translation. (a wen was possibly a skin ailment, like a mole or a cancer). Banishing to/beyond the hills and shrivelling are the apparent themes. You don't have to follow me on this one, much less agree. Frankly this is the point I went off the deep end, probably.

Galdor can also protect! This just happens to be a banishment.

Gollum got exiled (the worst thing the early medieval and apparently proto-hobbit law could do to you) but not even for murder. No one found out about the murder. He just sucked.

ALSO Gollum lied and said that his matriarch (who exiled him) gave him the Ring. This implies it was plausible she'd give out rings, implying female ring-giver (standard role of a king). This is mentioned once and never again. ok!!

One last fun fact about galdor: it is the word at the end of "nightingale" isn't that lovely? Luthien's name in-universe means nightingale. This is fine!

I spent a lot of time researching Aragorn's favorite rock. I love these books. If I recall correctly it's a real rock! but possibly. just a cool rock.

Okay I'm almost done with Fellowship, here's an incomplete list of shit I noticed and thought was buck fucking wild on my first ever read-thru: medieval edition.

In literally the second line of the book, Tolkien implies that Bilbo Baggins wrote a story which was preserved alongside the in-universe version of the Mabinogion (aka the best-known collection of Welsh myths; I promise this is batshit). This is because The Hobbit has been preserved, in Tolkien's AU version of our world, in a "selection of the Red Book of Westmarch" (Prologue, Concerning Hobbits). If you're a medievalist and you see something called "The Red Book of" or "The Black Book of" etc it's a Thing. In this case, a cheeky reference to the Red Book of Hergest (Llyfr Coch Hergest). There are a few Red Books, but only Hergest has stories).

not a medieval thing but i did not expect one common theory among hobbits for the death of Frodo's parents to be A RUMORED MURDER-SUICIDE.

At the beginning of the book a few hobbits report seeing a moving elm tree up on the moors, heading west (thru or past the Shire). I mentioned this in another post, but another rule: if you see an elm tree, that's a Girl Tree. In Norse creation myth, the first people were carved from driftwood by the gods. Their names were Askr (Ash, as in the tree), the first man, and Embla (debated, but likely elm tree), the first woman. A lot of ppl have I think guessed that that was an ent-wife, but like. Literally that was a GIRL. TREE.

Medieval thing: I used to read the runes on the covers of The Hobbit and LOTR for fun when I worked in a bookshop. There's a mix of Old Norse (viking) and Old English runes in use, but all the ones I've noticed so far are real and readable if you know runes.

Tom Bombadil makes perfect sense if you once spent months of your life researching the early medieval art of galdor, which was the use of poems or songs to do a form of word-magic, often incorporating gibberish. If you think maybe Tolkien did not base the entirety of Fellowship so far around learning and using galdor and thus the power of words and stories, that is fine I cannot force you. He did personally translate "galdor" in Beowulf as "spell" (spell, amusingly, used to mean "story"). And also he named an elf Galdor. Like he very much did name an elf Galdor.

Tom Bombadil in fact does galdor from the moment we meet him. He arrives and fights the evil galdor (song) of the willow tree ("old gray willow-man, he's a mighty singer"), which is singing the hobbits to sleep and possibly eating them, with a galdor (song) of his own. Then he wanders off still singing, incorporating gibberish. I think it was at this point that I started clawing my face.

THEN Tom Bombadil makes perfect sense if you've read the description of the scop's songs in Beowulf (Beowulf again, but hey, Tolkien did famously a. translate it b. write a fanfiction about it called Sellic Spell where he gave Beowulf an arguably homoerotic Best Friend). The scop (pronounched shop) is a poet who sings about deeds on earth, but also by profession must know how to sing the song or tell the story of how the cosmos itself came to be. The wise-singer who knows the deep lore of the early universe is a standard trope in Old English literature, not just Beowulf! Anyway Tom Bombadil takes everyone home and tells them THE ENTIRE STORY OF ALL THE AGES OF THE EARTH BACKWARDS UNTIL JUST BEFORE THE MOMENT OF CREATION, THE BIG BANG ITSELF and then Frodo Baggins falls asleep.

Tom Bombadil knows about plate tectonics

This is sort of a lie, Tom Bombadil describes the oceans of old being in a different place, which works as a standard visual of Old English creation, which being Christian followed vaguely Genesis lines, and vaguely Christian Genesis involves a lot of water. TOLKIEN knew about plate tectonics though.

Actually I just checked whether Tolkien knew about plate tectonics because I know the advent of plate tectonics theory took forever bc people HATED it and Alfred Wegener suffered for like 50 years. So! actually while Tolkien was writing LOTR, the scientific community was literally still not sure plate tectonics existed. Tom Bombadil knew tho.

Remember that next time you (a geologist) are forced to look at the Middle Earth map.

I'm not even done with Tom Bombadil but I'm stopping here tonight. Plate tectonics got me. There's a great early (but almost high!) medieval treatise on cosmology and also volcanoes and i wonder if tolkien read it. oh my god. i'm going to bed.

edit: part II

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Hey everyone, please consider buying the 2024 itch.io Palestinian Relief Bundle- it's 373 games, game-making assets, tabletop roleplaying games, zines, and comics for a minimum of just 8 USD! They have a goal of 100,000 USD, and as of the time I'm writing this post, they have 8 more days to reach it.

Link will be in the reblog!

Okay, time to get pretentious and REALLY talk about this shot.

So put on your over-analysis goggles, and let’s talk about the Imperial Cog, Renaissance-era military forts, 18th century prison architecture, the military-industrial complex, the surveillance state, and why this single shot of Mon Mothma standing in a doorway in “Nobody’s Listening!” (the 9th episode of Andor season one) is making me so feral I want to kiss Luke Hull and his entire production design team right on the mouth.

Keep reading

I think the hardest part about addressing child abuse is getting people to acknowledge, not just intellectually but actually responding accordingly, is that the biggest threat to children, the biggest risk of abuse, is family and parents.

it is of course most often parents who are crowing about needing to protect children (often against far smaller threats than family), and pointing out that they are, statistically, the biggest threat to their kids is not gonna be received well.

Tomska going hard on Twitter again.

one might imagine sisyphus learning by playing, winning by learning, and begin by beginning

you ever just sit and realise u can’t remember 80% of your childhood? like … what happened? who am i ..?