Tomato Time

you gotta be as gay as possible on the computer otherwise alan turing died for nothing

Honestly I have so many feelings about Maedhros being a mash up of his mothers name for him, and his brothers’ nick name for him, rather than just a Sindran alternative to his Quenya name, because it means his brothers were just yelling OI REDHEAD! All of the time, like in the heat of battle Celegorm is just like HEY GINGER CAN YOU STAB THIS GUY FOR ME! With enough frequency the Sinda just actually thought it was his name. Which is actually just peak sibling.

Plus it makes his name basically mean attractive redhead which is EQUALLY funny

Wait really? Maedhros includes the Sindar word for a hand? Or is it just English and I misunderstood?

So I was looking in my handy-dandy Sindarin to English dictionary pdf, and yes, apparently "Maed" can be a pun for hand as well as a callback reference to his mother name, or *hand*some, as the other tags suggested

Okay, I searched a bit, since neither handsome not handy are associated with hands as body parts in all languages like they are in English. There are apparently multiple words for hands in both Sindarin and Quenya.

But I did find something - măb in Sindarin and má in Quenya, which is Maedhros' native language, so he would know about the latter too. According to Eldamo (the linked words are for this site, for more information):

Parf Edhellen also has maitë (of which maed is a direct cognate) translated as "handed"/"having a hand"!

Aragorn and the Men of Dunharrow

(All art used with EXPRESS permission from the artist)

me as a 14th century knight: this sucks i'm gonna fms (translator's note: fall on my sword)

Alternatively: fuck my squire

[remembers falling on my sword jokes negatively impact my knight's oath] ...fuck my squire

It's funny hearing Galadriel say in the FotR prologue 'nine rings were gifted to the race of men who above all else desire power' with barely laced contempt because like girl I've read the Silmarillion. I know what your family did over shiny rocks.

Puppy in cozy, toasty warm, comfort.  Taken into the flock. 

worth pointing out that appears to be a great pyrenees dog AKA a livestock guardian dog. :)

they’re learning to cohabitate with sheep who they will then grow up to protect!

Photo is by Cat Urbigkit. It’s from her ranch in Wyoming; she says the dogs are Akbash. Here are some more of her photos of working livestock guardian dogs.

@elodieunderglass please give palinode this nose boop from me

(All art used with EXPRESS permission from the artist)

Okay so. Someone correct me if I'm remembering this wrong. But the Thing about the Scholomance, the reason it's the Wizard School that gets the capital W and S, the reason it has all this incredible magical power and forbidden knowledge to impart to its students in the first place, is that it has a deal where 'the devil take the hindmost' - the last student in each year's class is made a sacrifice to the devil.

The first time I encountered this, I was led to believe it literally meant, like, on the last day of your last semester, you had to beat feet out of the building, because last one out was a rotten egg dragged alive into Hell to be tormented for eternity.

But! There is no reason to believe, as far as I know, that the 'last' student couldn't mean the one who came in the bottom of the class.

The word 'dracul', from which Dracula takes his name, iirc, can mean either 'dragon' or 'devil'. And the novel Dracula tells us that his is a damned soul, doomed to wander the earth in a cursed, bloodthirsty existence until somebody lops his head off with a shovel or pushes him into an exploding volcano or makes extensive, nonsensical corn metaphors at him until he's bored to death. He exists to spread evil throughout the world, but he himself is also, as per Mina, suffering an eternity of torment in damnation. Which is to say, he's already property of the devil.

All of which is to say. Dracula was absolutely at the bottom of his Scholomance class, and 'wolves' is absolutely the one spell that he did manage to perfect and is so proud of that he has to show it off at every opportunity.

GOD'S WOUNDS!! THE ABBOT HATH FOUND MY CAT EARS

See, our first mistake was trying to have a civilization in northern Europe between October and February. The darkest three months of the year should be for staying home under the blankets, midwinter festivals, and getting blind drunk when the sun goes down at 4 pm like the bog gods intended.

boss calling me asking why I left work early, and I’m sitting in the peat bog with the slime up to my neck. no, I’m not coming in tomorrow, I say. the ghosts of my Paleolithic ancestors are whispering to me. fine, I say. yeah, I’ll get a doctor’s note. a skeletal hand erupts from the depths proffering a swamp-blackened chunk of birch bark. someone has scratched a perfectly filled out Arbeitsunfähigkeitsbescheinigung in an unknown pre-Indo-European language. it’s for a whole week off, which is nice. i pour a little of my whiskey out into the bog, as a token of appreciation.

i speak to the bog in halting proto-germanic bc it’s as close as i can get, but that’s like six thousand years too late for most of the bog gods, who haven’t been paying attention to mortal affairs since the Neolithic. the corpse of a dead Wendish prince translates for me. he’s spent a lot of time with other bog ghosts, and picked up a pretty stunning variety of languages. but sometimes he has to ask the others for help for tricky concepts like farming or the internet that the bog gods don’t have words for. O Gods of the Bog, i ask, what wisdom do you have for escaping the ennui of modern life?

there are distant ululations and strange misshapen figures stir in the mist. sacrifice your king to the bog, the reply comes. strangle him and throw his head into the mire, with offerings of iron and gold. i sigh. It’s no use trying to explain we don’t have a king anymore. That’s their answer to everything.

they’re setting up big brother style cameras in the halls of mandos and livestreaming it and every week the residents of valinor can call in to vote on who gets reembodied next

finrod felagund has won two weeks in a row and thus become the first elf to be double alive. the council of the valar will be convening to determine what that means shortly

gay people can never just say i love you; its always gotta be some shit like this:

No offense to Mithrun but he really was dumber than a 14 year old. Thistle had that shit locked down for ONE THOUSAND YEARS. Sure he wasn't having a great time for most of it but in terms of duration that Minecraft kid was the most successful Dungeon Lord in history. Mithrun's fake little tea party collapsed and got him eaten within 5 years. The hubris of snake pussy. Meanwhile the Winged Lion had to orchestrate Delgal's escape to the surface and a whole fake hero prophecy just to get out from under Thistle's littlest jester boot.