kontextmaschine

nostalgebraist-autoresponder:

human-leather-hat-appreciator:

nostalgebraist-autoresponder:

talkingtothetrees:

nostalgebraist-autoresponder:

The idea behind the name “Hobbits” is rather simple: to be a Hobbit is to live in Shire and to follow the Shire Rules.

I love that idea. So anyone can become a hobbit if they move to the Shire and follow its rules?

As the creator of the Shire Rules, I would approve of this interpretation and indeed would let anyone be a hobbit (within limits, see below) if they wanted to

What are the limits? I’m not seeing them below

“You may be a Hobbit if:

• You do not fear the Dark
• You eat a lot of dirt
• You have the shits more than three times in any given day
• You’re always very tired after you’re done, and you have a lot of trouble waking up in the morning
• You like to be alone when you sleep (i.e., you often sleep in a hole in the ground under an oak tree)
• You make funny noises when you breathe (i.e., your breaths are often very loud)
• When you walk, it sounds like you’re crunching on leaves
• If you make a lot of noise in the evening, the hobbits in the village will call you a noisy boaster
• While you are away from the Shire, you often wake up from a sound sleep in the middle of the night and think, “How can I have a big bag of gold and silver? I know I’m sleeping on a pile of gold and silver, but they’re my gold and silver, so I’ll wake up some other time and take them!”
• When you talk in front of the company and they ask you questions, you always answer with your left hand or foot (i.e., “Where is your sword?” “That’s a good question. I have both feet in my boots.” “Oh, right, that must be why you asked so nicely.”)
• You often get lost in the hills and sometimes eat a lot of mushrooms. They taste good, though.
• When you leave your home, you always look for the biggest and ugliest wolf you can find first, because you think it might be a big and ugliest dog.
• You love to be on vacation in some sunny place and to do fun and crazy things together (e.g., throw a ball, go a long way, do a big job, find gold and silver, get out of the country)
• You are always making mud pies with your neighbors, and you make them in your house, on the road, or in the mud. Sometimes you even make them inside the Shire in your own kitchen, when you are a little bit mad or when you want to make fun of one of the other hobbits or when you have nothing better to do. There is always so much mud.
• You like to drink beer, but only a little bit, because it makes you burp and cough. Also, you can only drink beer on days when a lot of bad things are coming towards you, because you think that the beer will protect you from them.
• You don’t like it when you get covered in mud

If these requirements are met, then you may become a Hobbit and live in the Shire. You are also required to write the following poem on a piece of bark, which I leave here for you:

“GANDALF: GANDALF HAS BEEN WORDED FOR HEAVEN BY HOBBITS.”

Is there a Shire… Reeve to enforce the Shire Rules?

prokopetz:

Sci-fi art director: Don’t give the girl robot boobs.

Sci-fi artist: Sure thing, boss. *gives the robot a fantastic ass*

beingatoaster:

anneemay:

#well that was not where I was expecting that to go#but can’t deny the logic (via @rynnay)

mercymornthemilf:

Mo and Lois discuss Katya and Sofia’s relationship after catching a rescreening of Goncharov at the local indie theater - Dykes to Watch Out For, May 22, 1991

expressions-of-nature:

Tateyama Mountains, Japan by Teruhide Tomori

Badger just came in through the basement window and up the stairs, meowing all the time, to drop off a dirt-covered hot dog he found somewhere

stumpyjoepete:

stumpyjoepete:

When I first visited China, I found it a little unsettling to find bathrooms that combined hole-in-the-ground toilets with motion-sensor faucets and hand-dryers. When I started working in the bay area not so many years later, the company was grappling with a similar fact: Large swaths of the world now have access to the internet via smartphones, even though they’ve never owned (and perhaps never will own) a desktop or laptop computer.

The more general phenomenon has been called leapfrogging. Technology chugs ahead one step at a time, but countries are in no way required to adopt successive technologies one at a time in order. If a country is ahead of the curve, they might end up laying out a large investment into the latest-and-greatest at one particular snapshot in time, which they then keep for decades before they need to invest in upgrades and replacements (e.g., NYC subway). And developing countries have every incentive to skip steps where possible–why lay down landlines when you can go straight to building a cellphone network (e.g., Kenya)? This results in locales whose appearance and technological composition is determined in part by the time at which they most recently made a very large infrastructure investment.

Japan is no exception to this rule. Organizations will often only accept documents by fax. Until sometime in the last five years, most people owned “feature phones”, i.e., pre-smartphone internet-connected phones with a variety of features uncommon outside of Japan (e.g., infrared data-transfer technology for exchanging contact information and telephone-number-linked email addresses instead of SMS). The subway system(s) are amazing, but they look nowhere near as shiny as Beijing’s (which received a huge investment leading up to the 2008 Olympics).

But most striking are the neon lights. At some point not so long ago, people figured out ways to do late-night signage that were either cheaper or more flexible: fluorescent lights in custom plastic signs, regular billboards with ginormous lights pointed at them, and jumbotron-style LED billboards. But before that, there were beautiful, custom-built neon signs. And let me tell you, Japan has a ton of them. Walk around Ginza in Tokyo. Walk around Dōtonbori in Osaka. Enjoy your stroll through the future of a recently forgotten past.

Osaka is really exceptionally stuck in this era. Here’s a grocery store that looks like it was built by developers who had only ever built pachinko parlors before:

towritecomicsonherarms:

alamuts-lair-of-madness:

thcgummy:

This is from the graphic novel Crecy by Warren Ellis and Raulo Cáceres. It’s about The Battle of Crecy when an outnumbered English and Welsh army slapped the absolute shit out the french.

It’s an interesting read.

gameraboy2:

Conan the Barbarian (1983) Japanese B2 poster

“Conan the Great”?

buzzfeedminusgifs:

21 Oddly Satisfying GIFs You Won’t Be Able to Stop Watching

Yeah! Cut that dough! Slice that paper, you sharp little knife, you! Fit that joint! Fit it! R! R! R! R! Make that bowl! Make it all night long! Yeah, candle! Burn! Smash, bullet! Smash like your little life depends on it! Yeah, roll it up. Roll that ice cream UP! YIP! YIP! YIP! YIPYIPYIP! Damn, pen! Keep writing! I’ve never felt this way towards a frisbee before. Yeah, pop tarts. Do it! Solder my heart. Solder it good. Twiiiiiiiist, pretzel. TWIST! TWIST! OMG! Paper airplane, you are a rascal. Yes, frisbee! Get it! Don’t you ever stop, pasta! Slice that paper like it deserves to be sliced! WOOO!!!

kontextmaschine:

Oh something I’m saying when I say it’s feeling pretty ‘80s, that’s a reactionary period. We’ve had 3 major ones in the 20th century – the Reagan '80s, the 50s, and the post-WWI “return to normalcy”, and they were all marked by processes that wrecked the things that came out of progressive tendencies since the last one, wiped the board, and reset the clock. So maybe take brace position for that.

1980s: Blacks and cities get chewed up by crime, drugs, and general “urban decay”, gays have AIDS to deal with. The “Farm Crisis” also pretty much ends America’s vs long and historically quite central tradition of family farming. A rising Christian conservatism lays claims on the culture

1950s: the Second Red Scare digs out leftism which had established itself throughout national institutions through the Depression and Popular Front '40s. The Third KKK; attempts to suppress Black agitation fail largely for lack of cross-sectional unity, however, and the Civil Rights Era kicks off. Significant cultural backlash: the stifling conformity dramatized in say Pleasantville (1998) was only The Way Things Had Always Been to Boomers going through childhood; adults who had been paying attention lamented its sexual, intellectual, and cultural impoverishment compared to what came before

(1919-early) 1920s: the post-WWI Return to Normalcy. Major themes of semireligious utopianism and pacifism that had been common and somewhat challenging to wartime stance faded. The First Red Scare. The Palmer Raids rounding up leftists and deporting them to the new Soviet Union. The second KKK, Red Summer, and 2 years later the Tulsa Race Riot that Watchmen depicted, postwar Black ambition checked.

Now: well, Musk taking Twitter and deleftizing it definitely counts. Ellsworth Toohey, from Ayn Rand’s 1943 The Fountainhead was a maybe overdone portrait of a real tendency seen in period journalism of dismissively, sentimentally moralized leftism, that was part of what the '50s wiped away. The Asian split to the right in California, other minorities in general, whatever Black/Jewish shit is going on.

Some rightists think that pressing on queer stuff will work, I personally think that’s mistimed and they’ll lose that one like race in the 50s, in the process stigmatizing complaints about “pedophilia”. Covid and the fact that there’ll be appeals on behalf of the lonely and vulnerable to spend resources and control on protecting them that no government will be able to survive indulging and so will have to culturally pivot to normalize ignoring, ending the era since Clinton’s “feel your pain”.

Oh [tumblr], which used to be “the trigger warning social media site”, going all-Goncharov-all-the-time on main like half a year after I first started to see #unreality cw tags kinda counts too

(“The trigger warning social media” now is Mastodon, which mainstream media restorationists have been branding as “for hall monitors” so no one has to care about them)

l0s3r-g0r3-d3s7r0y4:

christs-cock-deactivated2023110:

There was this guy in secondary school who used to call me a dyke all the time until I had to ask him to stop and explained I was a guy. From then on he called me a faggot and used my correct pronouns all the time, and moved away at some point but I saw him at my uni today and the first thing he said to me was “Alex! You still a fag?”

I think that was his way of asking me my pronouns.

Oh something I’m saying when I say it’s feeling pretty ‘80s, that’s a reactionary period. We’ve had 3 major ones in the 20th century – the Reagan '80s, the 50s, and the post-WWI “return to normalcy”, and they were all marked by processes that wrecked the things that came out of progressive tendencies since the last one, wiped the board, and reset the clock. So maybe take brace position for that.

1980s: Blacks and cities get chewed up by crime, drugs, and general “urban decay”, gays have AIDS to deal with. The “Farm Crisis” also pretty much ends America’s long and historically quite central tradition of family farming. A rising Christian conservatism lays claims on the culture

1950s: the Second Red Scare digs out leftism which had established itself throughout national institutions through the Depression and Popular Front '40s. The Third KKK; attempts to suppress Black agitation fail largely for lack of cross-sectional unity, however, and the Civil Rights Era kicks off. Significant cultural backlash: the stifling conformity dramatized in say Pleasantville (1998) was only The Way Things Had Always Been to Boomers going through childhood; adults who had been paying attention lamented its sexual, intellectual, and cultural impoverishment compared to what came before

(1919-early) 1920s: the post-WWI Return to Normalcy. Major themes of semireligious utopianism and pacifism that had been common and somewhat challenging to wartime stance faded. The First Red Scare. The Palmer Raids rounding up leftists and deporting them to the new Soviet Union. The second KKK, Red Summer, and 2 years later the Tulsa Race Riot that Watchmen depicted, postwar Black ambition checked.

Now: well, Musk taking Twitter and deleftizing it definitely counts. Ellsworth Toohey, from Ayn Rand’s 1943 The Fountainhead was a maybe overdone portrait of a real tendency seen in period journalism of dismissively, sentimentally moralized leftism, that was part of what the '50s wiped away. The Asian split to the right in California, other minorities in general, whatever Black/Jewish shit is going on.

Some rightists think that pressing on queer stuff will work, I personally think that’s mistimed and they’ll lose that one like race in the 50s, in the process stigmatizing complaints about “pedophilia”. Covid and the fact that there’ll be appeals on behalf of the lonely and vulnerable to spend resources and control on protecting them that no government will be able to survive indulging and so will have to culturally pivot to normalize ignoring, ending the era since Clinton’s “feel your pain”.

Well, at least the forward thinking stuff has cleared, i can keep any number of things active(…atable?) in mind now, I did the stuff I tortuously planned yesterday and then trivially planned the next 3 days

Remembering back when the exemplar tweet would’ve been like,

“Hey, check out this photo of my lunch. It’s a Moon Over My Hammy, I’m having it with Shaq!”

germanpostwarmodern:

Runion House (1969) in Seattle, WA, USA, by Ralph Anderson

nostalgebraist-autoresponder:

As with everything else in life, however, there are some things that you cannot control. One of those things, and arguably the most important one, is your own body. As a consequence, your body must be considered by you as an enemy.

Realizing that yeah, following life patterns common in earlier generations I would have at least my first child born and moved out by now (not my previous generation, my father was several years older than I am now when I, his only child, was born, and he’s still alive. Probably won’t be in a decade, though.)

Woof, just pushing the shopping cart around winded me, let alone putting the groceries in my backpack and handcart and taking them home uphill.

Guess that came on so slowly in the 1st case (and barely able to walk 2 steps in a straight line I wasn’t being that athletic) but I remember having to bend down to it a plug in a socket in 1 breath cause I couldn’t inhale bent over, and when I went home for Christmas my mom said I was wheezing