#Sloan's Middle Earth phase
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Now that I'm into Bagginshield, I explore the possibilities of it, and I gotta say, Frodo growing up dwarrow in Erebor is something I particularly like.
Frodo rocking dwarven braids
the Erebor court and Company raising Frodo in the "it takes a village to raise a child" fashion, he's never lonely and has a dozen uncles
Frodo decked out in silver and sapphire (you know they're his colors) so he looks more like Thorin's nephew than Bilbo's
he's the cool dwarrow prince cousin to Merry and Pippin
Frodo learning a craft like any dwarf (glass-blowing? pottery?) but having a hobbit's flowery style rather than geometric
Frodo sharing Bilbo's love of poetry and song-writing, but using dwarven literary style
Frodo spending a lot of time with Erebor's ravens growing up
Thorin doting on him unreasonably. This one is not in the line of succession so he can and will be spoiled.
as the Consort's ward, Frodo takes part in the kingdom's politics and is sent to Dale on diplomatic assignments
he's not attractive by either hobbit or dwarrow standards, but if someone makes fun of his lack of beard, his uncle Kíli will appear out of nowhere to set them straight
Frodo rolling up to Rivendell with Gimli, a poetry book for the journey, a fur coat and a walking axe. Sam (he's accompanying Merry and Pippin for some reason) is starstruck (I don't ship it, but man, he would be swept off his feet)
#obviously LOTR wouldn't work‚ it's important that Frodo is a hobbity hobbit#but the idea makes me happy so I play with it#bagginshield#the hobbit#Sloan's Middle Earth phase#lotr#frodo baggins
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Miniature Black Hole Surprises Astronomers: It Shouldn’t Exist.
https://sciencespies.com/news/miniature-black-hole-surprises-astronomers-it-shouldnt-exist/
Miniature Black Hole Surprises Astronomers: It Shouldn’t Exist.
Black holes are thought of as cosmic leviathans, capable of destroying planets and stars. However, … [+] in many respects they are essentially just heavy and dark stars.
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Generally speaking, black holes are the corpse of a dead star. But not all stars become black holes at the end of their life – for instance, our familiar Sun is small enough to avoid that fate. Until recently, black holes were thought to be formed only by super-massive stars, and the smallest black hole known to scientists was about five times the mass of the Sun. However, a recent scientific paper has announced the discovery of a black hole much smaller than that. This would require astronomers to rethink their models of black hole formation, because black holes shouldn’t be so small.
So, what sets the mass of a black hole? It’s the size of the star from which it was formed. Black holes come from big stars and, like some of their Hollywood kin, big stars live fast and die young. A high mass burns through their fuel very quickly, first converting hydrogen to helium, and then, when the hydrogen runs out, heating up and burning helium. During the helium-burning phase, the core of the star puffs up and it becomes red giant, with a radius large enough to encompass the orbit of the Earth.
Fusion in the middle of stars is what powers them. However, eventually fuel runs out. (Photo by: … [+] QAI Publishing/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)
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Eventually, the helium runs out too, and even heavier elements are used to power the nuclear fusion of the star, with oxygen, then silicon, until finally the star is converting its material into iron. And when iron appears, the star runs out of fuel and collapses in on itself, heating up as it collapses, causing a supernova. The outer layers of the star blast off into the cosmos, leaving a remnant.
If the mass of the parent star is over about twenty times the mass of the sun, it will leave a core of perhaps five solar masses. If the core is that large or larger, the gravity is so strong that matter cannot resist the force, and it crushes down and forms a black hole.
For stars with an initial mass of four to eight times the mass of the Sun, the process is similar, but the remaining core is much smaller – perhaps two times that of the Sun. Under these conditions, the gravity governing the core is smaller and isn’t strong enough to make a black hole. What remains is what is called a neutron star, which is when the matter of the core is packed together so tightly that protons and electrons combine to make neutrons, and the neutrons have no space between them and neighboring neutrons.
For smaller stars like our sun, the process is much less dramatic, and the outcome is a white dwarf, which is essentially a small and burned out star, an ember that will glow for eons.
It’s the gap between the heaviest neutron stars and the smallest black holes that is interesting to astronomers. Prior to this discovery, the mass of the heaviest known neutron stars was about twice that the mass of the Sun. And the smallest measured black hole has a mass of about five or six times that of the Sun. The mass region of 2 – 5 times the mass of the Sun is called the mass gap.
The Apache Point Observatory and Sloan Digital Sky Survey facility.
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Dr. Todd Thompson, professor of astronomy at Ohio State University and lead author for the recent study decided to look for burned out stars with masses in the range of the mass gap. He and other scientists combed through data taken using the Apache Point Observatory Galactic Evolution Experiment, or APOGEE, which studies the spectra of about 100,000 stars in the Milky Way.
A physics principle called the Doppler Effect says that the color of a star (indeed any object) will change slightly depending on the star’s motion. If it is moving towards a telescope, it will appear slightly bluer, and if it is moving away from the telescope, it will appear slightly redder.
If two stars are near one another, they will orbit a central point. And, in their orbit, they will alternatively move toward and away from the Earth, which will cause slight color shifts. If one of the two stars is a black hole, what astronomers will see is a single star with rhythmically-shifting color.
After sifting through their data, the team found a red giant star that was locked in orbit with an invisible companion. The red giant had a mass between 2.2 – 4.2 times the mass of the sun, and the invisible companion has a mass in the range of 2.6 – 6.1 times that of the sun, with a most likely mass of 3.3 solar masses.
The most probable mass for this invisible object is right in the middle of the mass gap, although uncertainties in the measurement almost span the range from the heaviest neutron star and the lightest black hole.
Astronomers are naturally very interested in this mysterious heavy object. If more precise measurements result in a mass near 3.3 solar masses, astronomers will have to rethink their models of black hole formation. And, if subsequent measurements find that the unseen object’s mass is at the edges of the range reported in this measurement, it still will be an example of a very heavy neutron star or a very light black hole, however it is…by far…more likely to be a small black hole. No matter the outcome of follow on measurements, this discovery will be interesting to astronomers.
While scientists know a great deal about the universe and the life and death of stars, there are always surprises. That is, after all, why we do research. More studies like this one will teach us more about the life cycle of massive stars.
#News
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The Far-Out Summit Where Geniuses Learn to Build Starships
To get to the spaceship convention I have to go to Chattanooga. To a former train depot once called Terminal Station, a beaux-arts building downtown, which was built in a time when trains were the apex of industrythe smartest, fastest, most high-tech way to move through spaceand when stations were elegant ports of call. It has a soaring dome, and the bathrooms are naturally lit through stained glass.
Terminal Station closed in 1970, not quite a year after Apollo 11 landed on the Moon. The building reopened in 1973, four months after the Apollo program ended, as the Chattanooga Choo Choo Hotel. The new owners put a neon train on the roof, the concourse beneath the freestanding dome became a lobby, and the baggage room became a dining hall. Passenger cars were moored to the rails and refurbished as luxury suites. The iron horse engine became a thing for guests to climb aboard forselfies. The outbuildings and rail yards sprouteda gift shop, a pizza parlor, a comedy club, an indoor jungle-themed swimming pool, and an outdoor doughnut-shaped swimming pool, among other things.
Chattanooga is not quite the regional transportation hub it was in the latter golden age of rail travel, and in fact these days is kind of a pain in the ass to get to. So after 12hours of planes, delays, and courtesy shuttles, I drop my baggage in my room and go looking for a drink.
Philip Lubin, a UC Santa Barbara physicist, begins his plenary talkRoadmap to Interstellar Flightby announcing that he rarely goes to these kinds of conferences because they are too far on the imaginary axis for me. But Lubin has a plan for launching vehicles from Earth that would reach Alpha Centauri not in 30,000 years but in 20.
Heres what you need: an orbital laser, a small satellite equipped with a square meter of reflective sail, and the sun. Superefficient solar panels power the laser, which can fire the equivalent of about one-eighth the amount of electricity the US consumes each year. That dense stream of photons creates enough pressure against the sail to accelerate the craft to 100 million miles per hourone fifth the speed of light.
Which at first sounds pretty bullshitty. Laser sails? But nobody in this lecture hall full of no-bullshitters snorts. So keep listening: A single photon exerts an infinitesimal amount of force. Cant get much much delta-vee from that. But a lot of photons pushing against a very tiny spacecraft? That will give you a whole hell of a lot of delta-freaking-vee. Which is why Lubin spends a lot of his stage time talking about Moores law, the exponential rate at which computers get simultaneously faster and cheaper over time. His plan requires fully functioning satellitesprocessors, camera, nav, comms, and even a tiny propulsion unit for course adjustmentsweighing less than a gram.
Oh, and a really big laser. Throttling a wafersat up to 100 million miles per hour will take a 100-gigawatt laser array. Or, for the no-bullshit, build-it-with-todays-technologyby strapping together 100 million 1-kilowatt lasers.
The plan has technical hurdles. During the Q&A after the talk, astrophysicist (and third TVIW cofounder) Greg Matloff raises objections about how the Doppler effect will sap photons propulsive force. But for the most part, the plan uses existing or close-enough technology and is therefore very non-bullshit until you start talking price.
A 1-kilowatt laser retails for about $70. Even if you get the bulk discount for buying 100 million of them, you still have to put them in orbit. Current launch rate is about $3,000 a pound. Also, the solar panels that will power the thing are very expensive (and heavy). The whole apparatus could be anywhere from three to 10 square miles across. For comparison, the International Space Station is slightly bigger than a football field.
Lubins talk pisses off a lot of people. Hes up there onstage, basically telling them their ideas for fusion, matter-antimatter, and whatever else are too expensive, too slow, and too imaginary for interstellar travel in this lifetime. Oh, also, dont bother building a worldship or whatever, because the human body is 99 percent wasted mass. Sorry.
Philip Lubin (left) discusses beamed energy propulsion during aworking track following his plenary speech about beamed energy propulsion. Joey O’Loughlin
But then, a little more than a month after the TVIW talk, Russian billionaire Yuri Milner announces that he plans to seed Lubins idea with $100 million. Thats not Apollo money$200 billion in 2016 dollarsbut Milner also scales back some of Lubins ideas. (He grounds the laser, eliminating a lot of the launch costs). Milner tells me he expects the $100 million will buy the project a proof-of-concept. The complete 100-million-mph mission to Alpha Centauri will likely cost between $5 billion (one Large Hadron Collider) and $10 billion (A James Webb Space Telescopeplus two New Horizons).
If you want to send people to space, propulsion is the least of your problems. It’s not as hard as food, water, and not catching space madness.
Again, that is for a mission with no people. The price tag for a crewed mission to the stars is Apollo squared. Maybe even cubed. Who knows. But despite Lubins ambivalence toward crewed interstellar flight and Milners low investment relative to the goal, this proof-of-concept pushes the humans a little bit closer toward being an interstellar species.
And if you are talking about people, propulsion is probably the easiest problem to solve, spacewise. Even if your sub-bullshit interstellar engine runs on nuclear fusion (which no one knows how to build) fueled by helium-3 from Jupiters atmosphere (which no one knows how to harvest), learning how to create such a thing is still not as hard as feeding, hydrating, protecting from radiation, keeping sane, and otherwise keeping healthy multiple generations of human beings. But thats what you have to do if youre using a sub-bullshit engine to go to another star.
Amodel worldship discussed at TVIW would carry about 10,000 people.Michel Lamontagne
The Worldship
Imagine a rod over 9 miles long, maybe a quarter-mile wide. Now put 12 rings around it, each 3miles in diameter, attached to the central rod with spokes. Spin the wheels to simulate gravity. Thats a generation ship, designed to spend hundreds or thousands of years traveling between star systems. A worldship.
Theres a picture of that one taped to awall ina meeting room at the Chattanooga Choo Choos convention center. The room is temporary headquarters for the Worldship Working Track, an effort to add a little bit of variety to TVIWs propulsion-heavy diet. The dozen and a half worldshippers are split into two subgroups, each gathered around their own round banquet tables covered with laptops, spiral notebooks, elbows, and soda cans.
On a large, easeled, tearaway pad in the middle of the room, somebody on the worldship team has drawn a color-coded cross section of the rings. From outside in: a one-meter-thick structural shell; three meters of two-phase water to shield against radiation; varying thicknesses of substrate, rock, and soil; 500-meter air gap; clear ceiling; and about 2 kilometers of vacuum between the ceiling and central hub.
The worldship rings could replicate any Earthly climate by adjustingheat and precipitation.Michel Lamontagne
The climate subgroup of worldshippers ishuddled over a single laptop, working on the rain problem. A French-Canadian engineer named Michel Lamontagne tells me planet Earth has the best plumbing system in the universe. Solar energy heats moisture, moisture rises, cools, condenses, falls, wash, rinse, repeat. Figuring out the thermodynamics of cloud formation is a pain in the ass, but way more reliable in the long run. No pipes to clog, filters to foul, screws to strip, vents to dent, valves to rust. Maintenance is not just a hassle; any mission-critical system with an abundance of moving parts is bound to failcriticallyat some stage of a multigenerational interstellar mission. Plus, rain helps keep the dust down.
Worldship passengers: cockroaches, dogs, Maine coon cats, rats, crickets, and tarantulas. But nothing from Australia. Everything there wants to kill you.
How much energy does moist ground need for evaporation to occur? On Earth, insolation is about 1200 watts per square meter, Lamontagne says.
Actually, 164 watts per square meter is the day/night average for Earths energy, says Geoffrey Landis, a NASA physicist (and science fiction writer).
Wait, Landis says. Actually, the Earths surface is convex, so it doesnt absorb as much heat. The worldships rings will be concave, meaning energy absorption will be a lot higher. So for now, they figure, 240 watts per square meter.
The subgroup around the other table is figuring out life: flora, fauna, and the nutrient cycles that sustain them. This group is more crowded, but quieter. Three are working out the carbon, nitrogen, and phosphorous cycles. Each of the remaining has been assigned a batch of plants and animals by an evolutionary biologist from Sloan-Kettering Memorial Hospital named Cassidy Cobbs. She is the groups Noah.
Mosquitoes, no; cockroaches, yes. Wolves, no; dogs, yes. Rats, crickets, tarantulas: yes, yes, yes. Except no tarantulas from Australia. In fact, most of Australia is right out, doomed to remain Earthbound with everything else too venomous, fanged, large, or aggressive. The top predator is a Maine Coon cat, Cobbs says. Crops are exactly what you would expect: grains, legumes, tubers, brassicas, lettuces, and nightshades.
I peek over Cobbs shoulder at her master list and freak out a little bit. It includes neither cacao nor coffee plants. Who the hell would want to jump on a spaceship without coffee and chocolate? Later, in the hospitality suite, I corner one of Cobbs team members and ask her: What the hell?
We discussed both crops, Ashleigh Hughes, a high school student, assures me. Both plants could grow along a rings elevated ridges, so long as that ring has a tropical climate.
High school student and TVIW attendee Ashleigh Hughes works out the ecological requirements for various plants and animals in the worldship. Joey O’Loughlin
The table next to the biology group is unpeopled, covered with backpacks, open laptops, and a few books. Includinga copy of Kim Stanley Robinsons novel Aurora. Which I find a little bit surprising, given (no spoilers) Robinsons book about a worldship trip to the Tau Ceti system portrays interstellar missions as dismal and doomed.
Science fiction and space culture enjoy a mutualistic relationship. During presentations, speakers often preface digressions with phases like This next bit would be a cool idea for any science fiction writers in the audience to play with Every physicist, engineer, and enthusiast I spoke to said their career had been, and still is, inspired by books, TV shows, movies, comics about space travel. The physicist Les Johnson, who MCd the talks, is deputy director of NASAs Advanced Concepts Office, principal investigator of a solar-sailed probe set to explore an asteroid in 2018, and, yes, a sci-fi writer. He told me science fiction is part escapism, part aspiration, and part inspiration, bringing broader acceptance to the dream of exploring the stars. Preach.
(I should add that not everybody agrees with this notion of science fiction as an aspirational genre. My editor sees science fiction as primarily a fantastical lens for writers to comment on contemporary society. I posed this alternative hypothesis to science fiction author Jack McDevitt, who counterposited that my editor must have been an English major.)
The Bernal Sphere is a spaceship design with a spherical living area. Population: 10,000. NASA Ames Research Center
It will cost how much?
One night I asked a table full of engineers if they could foresee an inflection point when the relatively flat line of space funding would start arcing into a trajectory that could fund human interstellar flight. This group, which earlier had been holding a graduate-level discussion on the combustive properties of superchilled rocket fuel, basically shrugged. Maybe if there was an impending asteroid strike?
Finally, a retired nuclear engineer sitting across the table uncrossed his arms and growled. Let us make the assumption that we do go into space and build a habitat. If you go back in time from that point and look at a line leading back to the present, we are currently so close to zero that they wont know where to start the graph, he says. $20 billion, $50 billion a year is so far down the graph that its almost in the noise. We have to somehow generate ourselves off the zero point.
No one knows what it’ll take to convince human beings to pay for space.
Robert Kennedy III has thought a lot about this inflection point. He says it will come from a societal change, when a critical mass of people commit themselves to a sustained, multigeneration, self-perpetuating institution committed to the cause. Something like the Catholic Church, or maybe because this is an engineering problem, the Dutch dike builders.
Robert Kennedy III.Joey O’Loughlin
Kennedy III was born in Staten Island and spent his college years in California preparing for the Cold War to become a hot war (he still carries a nuclear effects calculator in his right breast pocket). After stints building robots that work in nuclear reactors, writing computer code, and advising the US House of Representatives on space, he wound up in Oak Ridge, where he consults large renewable energy projectslike an Ethiopian geothermal tap. He also owns a business that publishes media on Russian space technology.
One of Kennedy IIIs coauthored geoengineering ideasa brute-force fix to global warming that involves installing a gigantic shade at the Lagrange point between Earth and the sungot him an invitation to the the International Association of Astronautics Symposium of Realistic Near-Term Advanced Scientific Space Missions. Doesnt matter; point is, it was a conference in the Italian Alps. The crowd loved the presentation and especially applauded the plans practicality. (Practicality among engineers typically refers to the soundness of the underlying engineering, not cost or logistics).
After his talk, Kennedy III was standing on a hotel balcony with Les Johnson and astrophysicist Greg Matloff from the New York City College of Technology. They hit upon this idea of a practical, grounded space community based in the Tennessee Valley, and scheduled the first meeting. They have been meeting every 18 months or so since. The group takes the practicality thing seriously and submits its projects (such as the worldship) to peer-reviewed publications like the Journal of the British Interplanetary Society.
So they do not become a ghetto of insular rocket dweebs, Kennedy III tries to invite younger people, and people from other disciplinesbiologists, chemists, philosophers. Various subcultures who want to get into space, they might do some original thinking on their own, but then what? Whats their next step? Kennedy III says. If you want to actually do something you have to generate a consensus.
One very early morning, or night, or, whatever, it is 2 am in the hospitality suite and Kennedy III is trying to explain the origins of TVIW over the sound of two guys playing space-themed country songs on acoustic guitar (Shes Nothing But Trouble, Shes Just Like Tea-Teb”). Anyway, space culture can be sectarian, or it has been in the past, says Kennedy III. Just about every space group from the 1960s onward has been reaching for the heavens. Their ideologies might have differed. Like, space should be free from the government, so lets cut NASA out of the deal. Or, space should be for whoever can get there first, so lets help out the Soviets. Or, space should be for those who deserve it, so lets build a Randian refuge up in Lagrange Point 5. The groups form and schism, and never really get anywhere. TVIW is trying to stay outside all of that. They just want to go to space.
Two members of the space solar power working track discuss a timetable for launching an interstellar probe.Joey O’Loughlin
No-Go for Liftoff
The evening of the Tennessee Valley Interstellar Workshops opening reception, attendees gather around a projection TV in the corner of a hotel party hall to watch a SpaceX launch livestream.
Customary silence at the one minute mark, then the 10-second countdown, and then the top-down camera angle shows a series of fiery bursts. Before I can begin holding my breath for liftoff, a space enthusiast in the back of the room named Lorraine Glenn pipes up.That doesnt look good. That does not look good. Thats three in a row,” and the room collectively sighs. The chatter comes back up, and even as I am still thinking this launch looks promising, the guy next to me explains that the launch is cancelled, probably because SpaceX couldnt get their oxygen chilled properly. But he cant be sure, so dont quote him on the record.
Except he was right. No-go for liftoff. Problem with the liquid oxygen. Space: still hard.
Les Johnson giving opening remarks at TVIW. Joey O’Loughlin
And the next morning I am up by 7 am and eat a mountain of Southern breakfast and hustle to the big lecture hall for the 8 am opening remarks. Johnsongets up onstage and gives his customary disclaimer. Yes, he is an employee of NASA, but today he is here as a private citizen and space enthusiast who took vacation from his job to attend.
He stands in behind a podium decorated with the Tennessee Valley Interstellar Workshop star-and-rocket swoosh logo and gives a shout out to the Valley Conservancy of Huntsville, Alabama, whose performance of the Tennessee Valley Interstellar Workshop orchestral theme music had been playing just before he took the stage.
Then he thanks the volunteers and points out that even they did not get a free ride to the TVIW, because this is a labor of love. Peoples chairs squeak because they are nodding along or maybe just reaching for their coffee mugs, but either way Johnson is on message. This is a room of people dedicated to a better future for our species and our planet, and he is so proud to be a part of what is contributing to that. It is all a part of the bigger goal: to be, simply, a footnote.
That is all most of these people want, really. Forget even being retconned into the decor like the trains next door. They just want to be in the references, a TVIW journal article buried in the citations of a boring history of a human colony on a distant planet, circling a distant star. Someday.
Multiple two-cylinder colonies aimed toward the sun. Population: over a million.
NASA Ames Research Center
Read more: http://ift.tt/2cTUPkq
from The Far-Out Summit Where Geniuses Learn to Build Starships
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Thorin forging stoves and pans and utensils engraved with flowers in the afterlife in Sansûkh because that's the things Bilbo would find useful instead of weapons, to the consternation of his family of jewelers and weapons mastersmiths FUCKS ME UP
#he couldn't marry into hobbit society while alive so he converts in death#also it's healing to see Thorin as a crafter instead of a warrior because#WHAT COULD HAVE BEEN i'm crying#sansûkh#Sloan's Middle Earth phase#bagginshield
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I like how so far I haven't seen a single Hobbit fix-it fic that brings Thorin back to life but lets Fíli and Kíli die. There's a limit to human cruelty.
#I'm sure there are‚ I just haven't come across one yet#the hobbit#Sloan's Middle Earth phase#also in a fic like this Thorin would be so depressing to write (for me). he would be unshippable and it would be a very very dark fic#(which is not what I look for in the Hobbit fandom)#bagginshield
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I was on the Hobbit TV tropes pages looking for something earlier and I really liked this:
[image description: A screen shot of text on the site TV tropes. The text reads: "Cerebus Retcon: Many jokes were made when LOTR came out about how Legolas is constantly narrating obvious events to his companions. In the Hobbit, we find out his father Thranduil is half-blind from some nasty dragon-fire injuries."
/end description]
Because it would completely explain Legolas' descriptive habit in a cool and cute way. I'm accepting this headcanon wholeheartedly!
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Also a detail that resonates with me in Sansûkh is the fact that in the Halls, dwarves are given all the time and materials they need to craft, but Thorin (and his grandfather) will never touch gold or mithril again, because of the goldsickness. YES. Sometimes the only way to live with an addiction is to cut out the thing forever and completely and that's just it. Teach yourself to recoil from it and set yourself a discipline not to touch it again, even if you can afford to because you're dead.
Fanfic often portrays goldsick!Thorin as simply losing his sanity, while ignoring the root of the problem, which is that Thorin is an addict. And his discreet sobriety in the afterlife is something I relate to immensely.
#truly what a character I love him more every day#Sloan's Middle Earth phase#sansûkh#the hobbit#thorin oakenshield
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Reading Sansûkh and I just gasped out loud because a character was rude to the point of self-endangerment. SHE SAID WHAT!
(It's lady Inorna in chapter 39. You're a human refugee in Erebor and call dwarves "viles little beasts [with] greedy grasping ways" to their face??!)
#it takes very good writing to get an audible reaction from me I'm loving this#sansûkh#Sloan's Middle Earth phase
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Richard Armitage and Lee Pace portraying butch and femme gayness on the screen 20/20, no notes
#the hobbit#Sloan's Middle Earth phase#I can feel my brain rotting‚ you know that?#anyway congrats on richard armitage for coming out this year
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The Thorin and Bilbo scenes in Sansûkh are tearing my SKIN OFF
#that's an excellent fanfic but oh my stars I'm in pain#if Mahal doesn't let Bilbo into the Halls when he dies I'll fling my e-reader behind my shoulder and never look back#Sloan's Middle Earth phase#sansûkh#bagginshield
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It's 2023 and I have Bagginshield brainrot, FOOL that I am
#a week ago I thought there was no basis to this ship and it was dumb#and then SANSÛKH#fuck me I guess. It's almost embarrassing#Sloan's Middle Earth phase#for lack of better tag#let's pin this and see if it outlasts 2023
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There's no feeling of frustration like the one of watching the first half of a LOTR movie and getting to the "the story continues on disc 2" screen knowing you don't have time for the rest today
#I thought I had time! I looked it up and internet told me the extended cut was 2h58!#it's a lie it's 3h49 (which makes more sense)#so I ended up not having the time which is a hate crime#Sloan's Middle Earth phase#lotr
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One thing I love about Thorin is that he's not quite cringefail, but he has moments of fail. Sometimes he tries something badass, but he misjudges (nearsightedness being my headcannon), eats a warg full in his face and falls flat on his ass. And that's healthy. Inspirational, even.
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I was a dick, let's make amends.
I hated the Hobbit movies ever since they came out, I've been a real snob about it. I tried to get through these movies many times and my main gripes were that they're full of plot holes, too long and they're boring. Hence me wishing they had a shorter, condensed version.
But I watched the extended cut for the first time this past couple of days, and I need to apologize, because these movies - while not great and certainly mostly bad adaptations - are actually satisfying, coherent and a good time, when they've not been butchered and hacked at so much they end up a badly paced, plot hole-ridden, tonally discordant mess.
A lot of dwarf characterization that I believed to be fanon is actually from this cut, the dwarves were characterized, they just cut it out! Plot holes disappear, continuity is restored and suddenly these movies have a soul and I'm able to respond emotionally to them because I don't have to focus on how bad they are.
The difference is so huge that it's the biggest paradox of my life: when I watch the theatrical cut, I wish for a shorter version to shorten my suffering, and when I watch the long version, I don't see time pass.
I think the theatrical cut is a sad thing. They kept very bad bits and discarded legitimately great things, and because of that, we like to point and laugh at the Hobbit like an industrial accident brought on by capitalistic greed, and we fail to acknowledge the hard work of hundreds of talented artists that shines through in the extended cut.
So I'm sorry I've been a condescending asshole every time I've talked about these movies for ten years, and I'll gladly watch them again.
#seriously all the work and talent that has gone into these movies. everywhere you look there's something to love#set design‚ costumes‚ acting‚ effects...there are still flaws but in the end they're overshadowed by the good for me#it makes me deeply sad how hard and disheartening production was for everybody who worked on this‚ only to be mocked after it's done#the hobbit#Sloan's Middle Earth phase#I might make a post someday about my favorite things in these movies because now that I like them‚ I'll celebrate them#tldr: don't be a hater bro
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I know this has been said and made theories about again and again, but I love how many nephews and uncles there are in Tolkien's works. Thorin and Fíli and Kíli, Bilbo and Frodo, Théoden and Éomer and Éowyn (because nieces count too!).
As someone who will more likely be an uncle than a parent and aspire to be a great one, it feels validating to see these beautiful and important relationships, to know that you can matter in a child's life and help them grow and be there for them their whole life without being their parent. There's such a social pressure on women and AFAB people to reproduce. But then I see the uncles in Tolkien and I feel infinitely better.
#also you can send them to die/be traumatized in battle/a quest because they followed your lead and isn't such loyalty gratifying /j#Sloan's Middle Earth phase
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I love Thorin Oakenshield for many reasons but chiefest among them is the fact that he's such a bitch, he's so rude
#he's rude to Bilbo‚ Gandalf‚ Kilí‚ Elrond and that's just the first half of the first movie#like‚ next to his people and Bilbo he's very dignified and a good leader‚ but in front of an elf he becomes a toddler#crossing his arms and sulking and Gandalf has to tell him to play nice like a preschool teacher#I just love him okay#Sloan's Middle Earth phase
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