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[ Image description: 9 images of various soups in bowls.

Text reads: "Reblog this post / to give this blogger a nice bowl of soup" /end ]

Rewatched Return of the Jedi and forgot how Han and Leia's romance sets up what unselfish love looks like to compare with in the prequels and also gives us context why love can be dangerous for a Jedi.

(Note: this isn't an!dala bashing I like an!dala)

With Han! (Yes! Han the non-Force sensitive.)

Han, we must remember has been out of the loop because of his Carbonite freezing, but even so he wakes up to: someone who loves you. Before that he had Leia declaring: I love you!

He gets very clear signs from Leia that she is in love with him. Like. Very clear out loud signs. In the Ewok village when they reunite they hug.

But he's still jealous of Luke.

So when he finds Leia crying after Luke says he's leaving to face Vader and that he's Leia's brother, his first reaction is jealousy. He gets mad when she refuses to tell him what's wrong. He accuses her of being able to tell Luke but not him, implying obviously she thinks Luke is more important to her.

His fear she doesn't love him back makes him angry.

You can see how it could lead to hate, this kind of situation. Hating Luke and Leia two people he adores because he thinks they're together, which would lead to him suffering unable to let go of his feelings for Leia and Leia suffering from his anger as well. He could destroy all their relationships with his anger, and he's just a normal non-Force sensitive guy.

And Luke and Leia aren't even a thing. He's just assuming! He's letting his emotions control him.

He's about to stomp away with a: bitter forget it! As she sobs.

But he stops! He stops giving into his negative emotions and he goes back to comfort her without demanding answers. He holds her because he loves her. He lets go of his negative emotions and possessive jealous feeling. His love is stronger than his fear.

Then on Endor he point blank asks her if she loves Luke. She answers Yes, not realizing unlike the Skywalkers he didn't get the memo from the Force about the family stuff.

And he is disappointed, but he says he'll step aside. He loves Leia and he's willing to let her go for her happiness.

That's what romantic love without possessive attachment looks like. He loves her. He puts his own initial negative emotions aside.

Becaise I'm tired of seeing this happen to other bloggers & also frequently myself:

If someone talks about being unable to do something without assistance due to a disability, and how that influences their life, how that dependency on others is scary and can be exploited etc. And your only response is "I experience this except I end up doing the thing by myself because no one helps me". and then they tell you "hey, you deserve to get support for this when you need it. but this is actually not the same as my experience because if i do not get help i absolutely can not get it done by myself. Like I'm fully unable to do this." And your response is to get mad / accuse them of trying to be "divisive" / telling them they're dismissing your struggles / blaming them for your feelings about this response essentially / calling them ableist for literally just pointing out the fact that there is a difference between these situations / etc, then you are the problem.

Just for a minute try to imagine what it's like. That you can not do something without assistance. Let's say you absolutely can not drive a car even if your life depended on it. You completely rely on being driven around. You can not do anything that requites a car without another person being physically there the entire time and holding the steering wheel. And tons of people see you talk about that and join in with "yeah I also can't drive in theory, but I still do it because I have to because my life depends on it". That does not feel good. That is a constant reminder that hey! Other people can totally do this even though its hard! If your support vanishes you can not do this thing your life depends on no matter how hard you try! The voices of people who actually experience the same thing as you get drowned out in the flood of these "I totally get it"s from people who do in fact, not totally get it. Because In reality, one of you is sitting behind a wheel and the other isnt and Never Will.

Acknowledging differences is not the enemy. We are not arguing about emotions here. We are literally begging people to see that two physical realities are different. And no matter how often we say that you still deserve support and that we acknowledge that things are hard and exhausting for you and sometimes even dangerous, that isnt enough for you? Every time I try to get one of these people to see reason I tell them: I know this is hard for you. I know this is exhausting for you. I acknowledge your reality. But that's not what they want to hear. So, what more do you want? For me to lay down and say "yeah actually we experience totally the same things" and then watch as the healthcare system out to save every penny tries to dismantle my support system because well, if I try really hard I'll probably get it done myself?

[ID: Tweet from Fesshole reading:

As a teenager in Neustrelitz (East Germany), I painted small stones purple and left them all over town. Did it for years. It drove the police and Stasi nuts. It meant nothing. It just felt good to do something they couldn't control or understand.

End ID.]

in my mind youtube isn’t a social media because i don’t talk to anyone on there. that’s just where video is :)

Apropos of (almost) nothing: I'm the kind of pedant who dislikes calling tentacle porn "tentacle porn" not because I think it's aberrant but because, 98% of the time, what's being depicted are octoform arms or tendrils, not tentacles. Tentacles are defined by the clubbed ends, which are the only part that have suckers. If it's tapered and has suckers all the way down, it's an octoform arm; if it has no suckers at all, it's a tendril.

You're welcome.

This site has gotta be the weirdest way to learn things

new knowledge for me and all my fellow mobster fuckers dropped

Eh, boss. We nose you and Tony are ya know, badda boom, but I thinks ya made a typo dar.

Gawd damn it, Frankie. This is what I get for trying to type with these tentacle thumbs.

ants are unironically my favorite animals so I clap and holler any time anyone antposts on here

one of my favorite drunk bar bathroom interactions was when I was waiting in line for a single occupancy toilet with another lady and she asked me very intensely what my favorite animal was and when I answered "leafcutter ant" she said "wow!!! that really upsets me!" in the most overjoyed tone of voice possible

Orange sky at morning, sailor take warning. Orange sky at night, sailor’s delight. Orange sky in middle of day, “what the fuck” sailor say.

Please read this man’s description of his dachshund and its most annoying habit

“I have a ridiculous dog named Walnut. He is as domesticated as a beast can be: a purebred longhaired miniature dachshund with fur so thick it feels rich and creamy, like pudding. His tail is a huge spreading golden fan, a clutch of sunbeams. He looks less like a dog than like a tropical fish. People see him and gasp. Sometimes I tell Walnut right out loud that he is my precious little teddy bear pudding cup sweet boy snuggle-stinker.

In my daily life, Walnut is omnipresent. He shadows me all over the house. When I sit, he gallops up into my lap. When I go to bed, he stretches out his long warm body against my body or he tucks himself under my chin like a soft violin. Walnut is so relentlessly present that sometimes, paradoxically, he disappears. If I am stressed or tired, I can go a whole day without noticing him. I will pet him idly; I will yell at him absent-mindedly for barking at the mailman; I will nuzzle him with my foot. But I will not really see him. He will ask for my attention, but I will have no attention to give. Humans are notorious for this: for our ability to become blind to our surroundings — even a fluffy little jewel of a mammal like Walnut.

…

When I come home from a trip, Walnut gets very excited. He prances and hops and barks and sniffs me at the door. And the consciousnesses of all the wild creatures I’ve seen — the puffins, rhinos, manatees, ferrets, the weird hairy wet horses — come to life for me inside of my domestic dog. He is, suddenly, one of these unfamiliar animals. I can pet him with my full attention, with a full union of our two attentions. He is new to me and I am new to him. We are new again together.

Even when he is horrible. The most annoying thing Walnut does, even worse than barking at the mailman, is the ritual of his “evening drink.” Every night, when I am settled in bed, when I am on the brink of sleep, Walnut will suddenly get very thirsty. If I go to bed at 10:30, Walnut will get thirsty at 11. If I go to bed at midnight, he’ll wake me up at 1. I’ve found that the only way I cannot be mad about this is to treat this ritual as its own special kind of voyage — to try to experience it as if for the first time. If I am open to it, my upstairs hallway contains an astonishing amount of life.

The evening drink goes something like this: First, Walnut will stand on the edge of the bed, in a muscular, stout little stance, and he will wave his big ridiculous fan tail in my face, creating enough of a breeze that I can’t ignore it. I will roll over and try to go back to sleep, but he won’t let me: He’ll stamp his hairy front paws and wag harder, then add expressive noises from his snout — half-whine, half-breath, hardly audible except to me. And so I give up. I sit up and pivot and plant my feet on the floor — I am hardly even awake yet — and I make a little basket of my arms, like a running back preparing to take a handoff, and Walnut pops his body right into that pocket, entrusting the long length of his vulnerable spine (a hazard of the dachshund breed) to the stretch of my right arm, and then he hangs his furry front legs over my left. From this point on we function as a unit, a fusion of man and dog. As I lift my weight from the bed Walnut does a little hop, just to help me with gravity, and we set off down the narrow hall. We are Odysseus on the wine-dark sea. (Walnut is Odysseus; I am the ship.)

All of evolution, all of the births and deaths since caveman times, since wolf times, that produced my ancestors and his — all the firelight and sneak attacks and tenderly offered scraps of meat, the cages and houses, the secret stretchy coils of German DNA — it has all come, finally, to this: a fully grown exhausted human man, a tiny panting goofy harmless dog, walking down the hall together. Even in the dark, Walnut will tilt his snout up at me, throw me a deep happy look from his big black eyes — I can feel this happening even when I can’t see it — and he will snuffle the air until I say nice words to him (OK you fuzzy stinker, let’s go get your evening drink), and then, always, I will lower my face and he will lick my nose, and his breath is so bad, his fetid snout-wind, it smells like a scoop of the primordial soup. It is not good in any way. And yet I love it.

Walnut and I move down the hall together, step by bipedal step, one two three four, tired man and thirsty friend, and together we pass the wildlife of the hallway — a moth, a spider on the ceiling, both of which my children will yell at me later to move outside, and of course each of these creatures could be its own voyage, its own portal to millions of years of history, but we can’t stop to study them now; we are passing my son’s room. We can hear him murmuring words to his friends in a voice that sounds disturbingly like my own voice, deep sound waves rumbling over deep mammalian cords — and now we are passing my daughter’s room, my sweet nearly grown-up girl, who was so tiny when we brought Walnut home, as a golden puppy, but now she is moving off to college. In her room she has a hamster she calls Acorn, another consciousness, another portal to millions of years, to ancient ancestors in China, nighttime scampering over deserts.

But we move on. Behind us, in the hallway, comes a sudden galumphing. It is yet another animal: our other dog, Pistachio, he is getting up to see what’s happening; he was sleeping, too, but now he is following us. Pistachio is the opposite of Walnut, a huge mutt we adopted from a shelter, a gangly scraggly garbage muppet, his body welded together out of old mops and sandpaper, with legs like stilts and an enormous block head and a tail so long that when he whips it in joy, constantly, he beats himself in the face. Pistachio unfolds himself from his sleepy curl, stands, trots, huffs and stares after us with big human eyes. Walnut ignores him, because with every step he is sniffing the dark air ahead of us, like a car probing a night road with headlights, and he knows we are approaching his water dish now, he knows I am about to bend my body in half to set his four paws simultaneously down on the floor, he knows that he will slap the cool water with his tongue for 15 seconds before I pick him up again and we journey back down the hall. And I find myself wondering, although of course it doesn’t matter, if Walnut was even thirsty, or if we are just playing out a mutual script. Or maybe, and who could blame him, he just felt like taking a trip.”

Looking back on it now, I think that one of the strangest things about The Lord of the Rings is that either 

Aragorn and Legolas managed to compose an absolutely epic lament for Boromir in the time it took to get Boromir’s body down to the river and arranged all nicely in the boat, 

or Aragon just started singing on the spur of the moment and Legolas took over for the second verse while Aragorn quickly made up the third. 

That’s some Cyrano de Bergerac wizardry right there.

Consider: Aragorn and Legolas had a generic lament all worked out with Mad Libs-style blanks for relevant personal details, just in case someone kicked the bucket and nobody else was down for singing their death song

OR

We take the fact that The Lord of the Rings is multiple of translations before it gets to the reader and is, in fact, made up by a later author and they just did some sort of haiku. 

oh no Boromir

he is very dead what do

put him in the boat

I can absolutely buy that Legolas made up verse two while Aragorn was singing verse one, and that Aragorn’s education was long on ‘spontaneous poetry to suit the occasion.’

Consider, it’s likely there are a couple existing templates for elegies in terms of tune, so they just needed words, and if ‘dialogue with the winds’ is also a common poetic device, the song basically just requires plugging in some suitable rhymes. Aragorn could totally hack that together in the time it took to pile up all the orcs’ weapons and arrange Boromir nicely in the boat and all that.

The wild part to me has always been that they chose to sing as Denethor. Legolas didn’t even know Denethor, and Aragorn knew that Denethor disliked him personally.

Aragorn and Legolas share broad elvish music practices, but from wildly different cultures, so it’s possible that the style of their verses did not match up at all

i just recently reread this and i noticed another wrinkle

i know the thing is that the east wind comes from mordor and they’re leaving it out for that reason. but this also sounds like

gimli: you left a verse for me but i’m not doing it aragorn: no no no we didn’t leave a verse for you. we don’t want you to do a verse. we’re good

This song was almost certainly a Gondorian lament, with, as someone else suggested, mad-libs style openings for personal details. Aragorn would have known it due to his time spent in Gondor or possibly written it himself in the Gondorian style – he would have used something appropriate to Boromir’s culture at any rate, not something random. Most likely Legolas made up the second verse while Aragorn was singing the first, but a verse was not left for Gimli because it’s less likely he would have the cultural knowledge to compose something appropriate. Legolas shares a language and a number of cultural values with the Gondorians that gave him a window that Gimli just wouldn’t have had.

That being said, I imagine Aragorn didn’t really intend for Legolas to start singing either, he just kind of did and it would have been more disrespectful to pick a fight about it so he went with it. Legolas’ verse has this interesting equating of the sea with death, which makes sense for him, as an Elf who was probably born in the third age. Everyone he ever knew who went to the sea probably never came back, and the concept of Valinor is probably more of a theoretical to him than to many older Elves. Sailing probably seems more like the Doom of Men to him than it really is.

This is, however, not really a cultural concept that Gondorians are likely to share, with their multiple coastal cities and specific history regarding the sea. The foundering of Númenor, while clearly still alive in their cultural memory, was still the event that led to the inception of their nation, and in other poetry regarding Gondor, such as the song about the Palántiri that Gandalf sings to Pippin, it is treated as a beginning, and not an end.

TL;DR: Legolas’ verse is a little bit off, culturally speaking, and most likely Aragorn intended to sing the whole song himself, but just kind of rolled with it when Legolas got involved.

Also, I can’t speak to the music and that’s been covered already but to add a religious/grieving two cents to it: if you’ve ever been in a place where a group of people begin to pray from the heart, aloud, and trade off as they feel they have the words to add to the prayer, it’s a beautiful thing and for me personally the descriptions evoke the same kind of feeling.

Never forget that it wasn’t a cold kind of “well, I guess we’ll use this gondorian song because singing is something you do at funerals and I guess we should make it fit for him.” They were grieving and when someone you love dies there’s a kind of disconnect there in the mind. Your rational brain isn’t really engaged. It hurts too much. And so you’ll do things without any kind of driving force behind it except that it’s what “feels right”. What feels like it will most honor the beloved dead.

So yeah I kind of see it as Aragorn remembering the mourning song and just feeling that it would be right to shape it to Boromir. Then Legolas, moved by love and grief, shaped a verse sharing his own understanding of death. And Gimili, lost and, again, grieving, is like “I would sing a verse if I could, but I can’t.” And Aragorn comforts him saying that it’s probably for the best (but with the implicit understanding that they know his grief is not less just because he doesn’t have the words to sing.)

On one hand I understand not teaching cursive in school anymore, because it actually is slower than regular handwriting and almost everything is typed on a keyboard now anyways.

On the other hand, so much of our (even recent!) history was written in cursive, and having a whole generation of kids who can't read letters written by their grandparents, momentos saved by their great-grandparents, or even photo albums from theur immediate family seems like a dangerously quick way to detach us from previous generations.

And on the third, related but slightly malformed hand, I feel bad that yet another form of small, everyday art that brings joy in the middle of mundane tasks, which celebrates personality and individual style and self-expression, is about to fade into obscurity because it wasn't efficient enough for today's world to put up with.

Like... if we continue to whittle away the small arts out of every day life, what's going to be left except stark, ruthless pragmatism?

Maybe writing a grocery list is less mundane when you get to feel elegant for a moment. Maybe you're a little more proud of what you write when you see it flow together like a painting

Sometimes I make posts that are like “Hey guys, maybe everything being optimized for efficiency and cheapness leaves some major defects in the average person’s ability to thrive psychologically” and some of you pop off like I’ve said I want to kill everyone who uses insulin with my bare hands, when mostly what I’m talking about is this sort of thing.

Came Back Wrong from the gocey store

forgot something

my oanges

I don't think you understand how much self-control it takes not to reply to literally every post about a hypothetical scenario involving dragons with this image:

bro LMFAOOOO

[Image description:

Image 1: A picture of book text saying In those early days, Google lived at Google.Stanford.edu, and Brin and Page were convinced it should be nonprofit and advertising free. “We expect that advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers,” they wrote. “The better the search engine is, the fewer advertisements will be needed for the consumer to find what they want…. We believe the issue of advertising causes enough mixed incentives that it is crucial to have a competitive search engine that is transparent and in the academic realm.”

Image 2: an image of young Anakin Skywalker with his shadow showing Darth Vader /End Image Description]

all i ever think about is skincare and getting rawed

have you guys considered hobbies

all i ever think about is tabletop roleplaying games and getting rawed

have you considered skincare

Disability will have you thinking shit like “I’m not even that disabled. I can manage as long as I limit myself to very specific careers, never go shopping for more than an hour or two at a time, keep my plans open so I can cancel and stay in if need be, and only go out a few nights per week at the most”