the first time i saw jupiter

you guys are so annoying. why do i have to see discourse every year that's like "was tolkien really a woke king or was he your conservative uncle?" the guy was a devout catholic and a genteel misogynist who maintained lifelong friendships with queer people and women, and this isn't even paradoxical because that was part of the upper-class oxford culture he was immersed in. tolkien told the nazis to fuck off (and in doing so demonstrated a real understanding of what racism is and why it's harmful, beyond simply "these guys are bad news because they're who my country is at war with right now") but his inner life was marked by internalized racism that is deeply and inextricably woven into the art that he made. he foolishly described himself as an anarcho-monarchist, and it's kind of crazy to see people on this website passionately arguing that he likely never meaningfully engaged with anarchist theory, because...yeah, no shit, of course he didn't. tolkien didn't have to engage with most sociopolitical theory because as an upper-class englishman of his position, he was never affected by any of the issues that this theory is concerned with. what is plainly obvious from reading both his fiction and letters is that tolkien's ideal political system was that the divinely ordained god-king would rise up and rule in perfect justice and humility; he didn't want a government, he wanted a king arthur, even though (obviously) he was aware that outcome was impossible. why is it so hard for people to accept that he was just some guy! his letters aren't a code you have to crack. no amount of arguing or tumblr-level analysis is going to one day reveal a rhetorically airtight internally consistent worldview spanning jrrt's fiction, academic work, and personal writings, thereby "solving" the question of whether he was a woke king or your conservative uncle. his ideology was extremely inconsistent because, at the end of the day, he was just some guy.

My King

Happy Godzilla day ❤️‍🔥

can you all tell me and be haters for a bit

a good sumerian inexplicably donated five packs of 500 temporary tattoos to the classroom, each pack featuring identical pictures of a different invasive species of bug

i meant samaritan you jackasses i was typing with one hand bc i was putting on one of the temporary tattoos and it got autocorrected

While the Onion buying InfoWars is indeed extremely funny, very few of the posts I've seen commenting on the sale have mentioned that the families of the Sandy Hook victims apparently agreed to voluntarily reduce their lawsuit payout as part of a deal to ensure that the Onion would acquire InfoWars wholesale, rather than having the company broken up and auctioned off piecemeal, as the latter course could potentially have allowed some of those pieces to end up back in the hands of Alex Jones' cronies.

Like, yes, it is in fact very funny that InfoWars is now a wholly owned subsidiary of Clickhole, but the real props go out to the Sandy Hook families who saw the opportunity and willingly gave up the additional millions of dollars that could have been realised by stripping InfoWars for parts in order to make that happen.

what is going on in these men’s lives

Help 5-Year-Old Mariam and Her Family Escape the Horrors of War in Gaza 🍉🕊

Five-year-old Mariam,🕊with her bright pink backpack and tiny hands clutching a red rose, was ready to head to her KG2 class. It was a Saturday morning, October 7, and Mariam was filled with excitement and pride for reaching the next stage of her education. She wanted to surprise her kind teacher with that little rose. But in an instant, her world — our world — was torn apart.

Without warning, the skies filled with the sounds of explosions. The joyful morning turned into a nightmare of dust, fear, and destruction. Her preschool was shattered, her teacher’s life taken, and our neighborhood became a place of ruin. That single day marked the beginning of a relentless assault on Gaza — a place where childhood dreams, laughter, and innocence were erased in moments.

I am Khaled Ismail, a 41-year-old father, and my wife Rasha is 32. We live in Gaza with our three children. Our youngest, beautiful Mariam🕊, is just five years old. Our eldest, Walid, 12, is a boy full of dreams, always hoping to become an inventor. And in the middle, there’s Karim, our 10-year-old, whose laughter and jokes used to brighten our darkest days.

But the war has left scars that words cannot heal. The day of the first airstrike changed everything. Rubble covered their toys, and black dust filled the air. The sound of my children’s cries mixed with the chaos of families running for their lives. We left our home that day, desperately searching for safety. But every step, every shelter, brought only more destruction.

For a year now, we have been displaced, moving from one place to another, only to be met with more violence. Today, our home is nothing more than a frail tent. It offers no shelter from the burning heat of summer or the biting cold of winter. My children’s small bodies are battered by this reality — malnutrition, intestinal infections, heat stroke, and even hepatitis are constant threats.

I have nothing left to change our situation. My children have lost everything. I have lost everything. Their childhood is buried under the rubble, their dreams replaced by survival, and their once-joyful laughter now a faint memory.

I am humbly reaching out to you with a plea to help us escape this endless nightmare. Our dream is simple: to find safety, to give our children a chance at life, to give Mariam and her brothers a future. With every dollar, you offer a glimmer of hope, a step closer to a place where they can finally be children again.

Please, be the reason my family finds peace. Your support, even just one dollar, can make all the difference. Together, we can turn this story of despair into one of hope and resilience. Start today, and be a part of the miracle we need.

Help Mariam🕊. Help my family. Let us find a place to live with dignity and hope. Thank you for reading, and thank you for caring.

My campaign is vetted by @90-ghost Link 🙏🏻💕

happy partially muscled skeleton stands by the perimeter fence and screams day!

Weird Al Yankovic and Will Forte songing Hot To Go by Chappell Roan?????

Look at this gorgeous set of Aubreyad notecards!!

i'm a writer irl (can't say who because my agent would put me into a blender and press go) and honestly the funniest and most humiliating incident of my life was the time my finished manuscript triggered a plagiarism flag with the publisher for two lines of prose in my literary fiction novel...

.... which was word for word similar to a paragraph in a certain explicit work on FFN starring elrond and his batsman from the hobbit films, aka that one elf that looked like he ate panic attacks for breakfast (i forget his name but it's Figwit II) where the lord of imladris bends said twink over his writing desk and gives him the battering ram treatment.

and if you think i had to sit in front of one if the biggest publishing companies in the world and admit that it was, in fact, me who wrote the fic where the lord of imladris bends said twink over his writing desk and gives him the battering ram treatment in order to avoid being wrongly flagged for plagiarism, you would be absolutely correct.

(yes they published the book)

This takes a lot of courage in a lot of important ways good job OP

Make Me Choose @polarcosmology asked: Francis Crozier or James Fitzjames?

Francis, a man like me… will do amazing things to be seen.

The Terror (2018) Season 1 Episode 8