hope is a skill

hope is a weapon you are trained to wield

favourite additions

You cannot hide this in the tags, bestie. This is too lovely to keep a secret.

i love everyone in this thread

@onlymollygibson said:

10. Most frustrating family member

Has to be Mrs. Norris. I'd like to acquaint her face with a brick 🥰

14. Favorite love confession from the books

An extremely unorthodox answer, but I'm obsessed with the horrific train wreck that is Mr. Elton's proposal in Emma.

15. Favorite love confession from the films

I suppose Mr. Darcy's “you have bewitched me” has to be the answer, but a very close second is Edward's proposal in S&S 1995, which isn't as “romantic” but is still so sweet and perfect <3

19. Moment that made you laugh while reading

My most recent belly laugh was when Henry finds Catherine in his mom's room in NA, specifically this part:

Austen asks

nononononoWAITWAITWAITWAITWAIT

Waking up from a fever dream and opening tumblr to see this certainly was an experience

How certain are you that you're awake?

Austen Asks!

you call this place "wall greens" yet its walls... are not green? how very pecuilar...

ah i see now. so "walgreen" was a clan of bandits who conquered various, smaller apothecaries in order to acquire the vast empire they now sit upon. how very cruel, this "america". you are ruled by warlords and do nothing to usurp them?

Wait 'til you hear about Applebees.

2025 glow up

#already doing this so ive got a headstart on the rest of you. watch out

Oh for the love! Fraternize with everyone. Their individual odds of disappointing you are high. But the bigger your circle, the lower their odds of all disappointing you at once. It's math (!)

i love the narrative that katniss would not have cared about her district partner if it wasn't peeta in the first games. makes me kick my feet in the air everytime, giggling like a child.

but i just don't think it is correct.

because the katniss i know would shout out the name of her district partner regardless of who they were the second the rule changed.

she just can't help herself. she wants to save the people from her home. she wants to save the people who remind her of the people from her home. she wants to save people simply because they are living, breathing humans who have done nothing wrong.

because she is a good person.

Legolas pretty quickly gets in the habit of venting about his travelling companions in Elvish, so long as Gandalf & Aragorn aren’t in earshot they’ll never know right?

Then about a week into their journey like

Legolas: *in Elvish, for approximately the 20th time* ugh fucking hobbits, so annoying

Frodo: *also in Elvish, deadpan* yeah we’re the worst

Legolas:

~*~earlier~*~

Legolas: ugh fucking hobbits

Merry: Frodo what’d he say

Frodo: I’m not sure he speaks a weird dialect but I think he’s insulting us. I should tell him I can understand Elvish

Merry: I mean you could do that but consider

Merry: you can only tell him ONCE

Frodo: Merry. You’re absolutely right. I’ll wait.

#legolas’ hick accent vs #frodo’s ‘i learned it out of a book’ accent #FIGHT FIGHT FIGHT

Legolas: umm well your accent is horrible

Aragorn: *hollering from a distance* HIS ACCENT IS BETTER THAN YOURS LEGOLAS YOU SILVAN HICK

Frodo: :)

Frodo: Hello. My name is Frodo. I am a Hobbit. How are you?

Legolas: y’alld’ve’ff’ve

Frodo, crying: please I can’t understand what you’r saying

Ok, but Frodo didn’t just learn out of a book. He learned like… Chaucerian Elvish. So actually:

Frodo: Good morrow to thee, frend. I hope we twain shalle bee moste excellente companions.

Legolas: Wots that mate? ‘Ere, you avin’ a giggle? Fookin’ ‘obbits, I sware.

Aragorn: *laughing too hard to walk*

@ghostriderofthearagon

dYinGggGggg…

i mean, honestly it’s amazing the Elves had as many languages and dialects as they did, considering Galadriel (for example) is over seven thousand years old.

english would probably have changed less since Chaucer’s time, if a lot of our cultural leaders from the thirteenth century were still alive and running things.

they’ve had like. seven generations since the sun happened, max. frodo’s books are old to him, but outside any very old poetry copied down exactly, the dialect represented in them isn’t likely to be older than the Second Age, wherein Aragorn’s foster-father Elrond started out as a very young adult and grew into himself, and Legolas’ father was born.

so like, three to six thousand years old, maybe, which is probably a drop in the bucket of Elvish history judging by all the ethnic differentiation that had time to develop before Ungoliant came along, even if we can’t really tell because there weren’t years to count, before the Trees were destroyed.

plus a lot of Bilbo’s materials were probably directly from Elrond, whose library dates largely from the Third Age, probably, because he didn’t establish Imladris until after the Last Alliance. and Elrond isn’t the type to intentionally help Bilbo learn the wrong dialect and sound sillier than can be helped, even if everyone was humoring him more than a little.

so Frodo might sound hilariously formal for conversational use (though considering how most Elves use Westron he’s probably safe there) and kind of old-fashioned, but he’s not in any danger of being incomprehensible, because elves live on such a ridiculous timescale.

to over-analyse this awesome and hilarious post even more, legolas’ grandfather was from linguistically stubborn Doriath and their family is actually from a somewhat different, higher-status ethnic background than their subjects.

so depending on how much of a role Thranduil took in his upbringing (and Oropher in his), Legolas may have some weird stilted old-fashioned speaking tics in his Sindarin that reflect a more purely Doriathrin dialect rather than the Doriathrin-influenced Western Sindarin that became the most widely spoken Sindarin long before he was born, or he might have a School Voice from having been taught how to Speak Proper and then lapse into really obscure colloquial Avari dialect when he’s being casual. or both!

considering legolas’ moderately complicated political position, i expect he can code-switch.

…it’s also fairly likely considering the linguistic politics involved that Legolas is reasonably articulate in Sindarin, though with some level of accent, but knows approximately zero Quenya outside of loanwords into Sindarin, and even those he mostly didn’t learn as a kid.

which would be extra hilarious when he and gimli fetch up in Valinor in his little homemade skiff, if the first elves he meets have never been to Middle Earth and they’re just standing there on the beach reduced to miming about what is the short beard person, and who are you, and why.

this is elvish dialects and tolkien, okay. there’s a lot of canon material! he actually initially developed the history of middle-earth specifically to ground the linguistic development of the various Elvish languages!

Legolas: Alas, verily would I have dispatched thine enemy posthaste, but y’all’d’ve pitched a feckin’ fit.

Aragorn: *eyelid twitching*

Frodo: *frantically scribbling* Hang on which language are you even speaking right now

Pippin, confused: Is he not speaking Elvish?

Frodo, sarcastically: I dunno, are you speaking Hobbit?

Boromir, who has been lowkey pissed-off at the Hobbits’ weird dialect this whole time: That’s what it sounds like to me.

Merry, who actually knows some shit about Hobbit background: We are actually speaking multiple variants of the Shire dialect of Westron, you ignorant fuck.

Sam, a mere working-class country boy: Honestly y'all could be talkin Dwarvish half the time for all I know.

Pippin, entering Gondor and speaking to the castle steward: hey yo my man

Boromir, from beyond the grave: j e s u s

Tolkien would be SO PROUD of this post

I'm not a fan of the perpetual virginity of Mary thing and not here to defend the Catholic Church, but Christianity definitely did NOT invent purity culture. I promise the Greeks and Romans were obsessing over that shit well before Jesus was born.

It was also widespread outside of cultures that influenced early Christianity. The elites in China, India, and Heian Japan all practiced one variety or another of isolating women within the household to control them.

If we want to truly overcome sexism in modern society, we have to understand how deeply rooted and widespread it is in human history. Christian purity culture is only one small facet of its expression.

Purity culture was, in part, a way for men to feel secure that their wife gave birth to their babies in a world before DNA tests. Matrilineal inheritance was a better solution but nobody listened to me.

Woah I'm curious now how many lovers did Mr. Gibson exactly had before he got married

Mr Gibson is such an interesting figure. (By virtue of education and the struggle against death because hes a doctor he's going to stand out anyways)

But then there is the gossips' assumption that he's the bastard child of French nobility. Like, what?

And his actual past with an unknown lost love.

And we'll never know. Just like there are some things about the actual people in my life that I'll never know.

Doomed by the narrative? Okay, I'm just going to physically fight the narrative for my right to live, thanks!

Fanfiction writers: do you ever post a chapter (maybe in the middle of a long story, maybe a week or two late, maybe both) and just get significantly less engagement than you're used to?

How do you keep it from affecting your progress on the story?

Is there a sort of wall in the middle of the story that once you start getting to the climax, engagement picks up again? How do I motivate myself to slow down and do it right during this phase even when there's a part of me that says it doesn't matter because people aren't excited about what I'm doing with the story anyway?

On twitter I’m seeing dozens of threads from Black activists warning people against burnout, giving all sorts of useful tips about preventing and managing it for the sake of a long-term, sustainable effort.

On tumblr I’m seeing a hell of a lot of young white kids yelling at anyone who actually follows those steps, and acting like burnout is a moral falling rather than a well-proven psychological phenomenon.

Be careful who you get your information from. Don’t let guilt lead you to make choices that will harm both you and the movement.

I’m going to reblog this again since I see more individuals are inquiring about burnout prevention tips in the notes and it’s why I sought out this resource. I hope it helps you!

source

now, I know she means Prim and her mother by “us” but in a way, she can also mean Peeta and herself; by saving her life, Peeta ultimately also saves his own

okay um I’m gonna talk about the baby clothes because sometimes the curtains are just blue but pretentious literature nerds need to make a living so … baby clothes

it’s so interesting that this is the moment before Katniss “turns her life around” with the food that Peeta gives her; not long after this she finds a way to feed her family and becomes the Katniss we know: the survivor and protector

but she has to give something up, and what is she trying to sell? baby clothes

not only do I think this represents her own (and Prim’s) innocence, but it also nods to the fact that Katniss, when she is old enough to consider this fact, now no longer feels safe enough to consider having babies in a world where they can lose parents and be stolen by the Capitol

and yet there’s a tiny twist because no one will take the clothes; she doesn’t manage to sell them; she just drops them in the mud and refuses to pick them up again for fear that she won’t be able to regain her feet; these baby things can only hinder (literally here, but more figuratively later in her life) a Katniss who is desperate to survive the nightmare she finds herself in

and then, in that moment, when she cannot sell something, she’s given something for free: bread and hope

and so, she never quite fully loses those things the baby clothes represent, because there’s someone out there who is willing to help her pick her girlhood up out of the mud and tell her “it will be okay”

@mollywog exactly!!!!

The addition at the end by the editor is beautiful...

A.I. photos are flooding social media and contributing to an Internet where we can't believe what we see. Spotting A.I. 📷s is an important media literacy skill.

None of us have time to research every image we see. We just need people to notice BEFORE THEY LIKE OR SHARE that an image might be fake. If unsure, check it or don't share.

I've started drawing some comics explaining the basic of AI spot-checking and media literacy in the age of disinformation. Follow along here or on my Twitter.