Reblogged juney-blues
It always gets me that the name "Gandalf" literally just means "Wand-Elf" or "Stick-Elf". I'm imagining old Gondorians just being like:
Librarian: I saw that weird guy at the library again today.
Guard 1: What weird guy?
Librarian: The old guy with the beard? Kinda elfy-looking, apart from the beard?
Guard 1: Oh, with the big-ass stick?
Librarian: Yeah, looked like he was carrying an entire tree branch.
Guard 2: Yeah, that's the Stick Elf.
Guard 1: Hell yeah, I fuckin' love the Stick Elf.
Librarian: The "Stick Elf"?
Guard 2: He comes by every few years, usually after some weird book or other.
Librarian: Oh. Yeah, he wanted a treatise on goblin breeding habits.
Guard 2: Like, how they have sex? We have books on that?
Librarian: Yeah, turns out we do. I was as surprised as you are.
Guard 1: What'd the Stick Elf need a fuckin' goblin-fuckin' book for?
Librarian: I didn't ask. So you just call him "Stick Elf"?
Guard 2: I mean, he looks kinda elfy and he always has that stick, so, like, yeah.
Guard 1: Dude also has some fuckin' dope pipeweed.
Guard 2: Oh yeah, his pipeweed is awesome.
Librarian: How long has he been coming here?
Guard 2: Oh, for decades. He's, like, super old.
Guard 1: More like fuckin' centuries. Dude's old as balls.
Guard 2: Wait, really?
Guard 1: Yeah, my gran-gran used to talk about him. She loved his pipeweed too.
Librarian: So he's… an immortal pipeweed dealer?
Guard 2: I think he's just, like, a connoisseur. He doesn't sell it or anything. He just always has some really top-notch pipeweed on him.
Archivist: Oh, are we talking about Stick Elf?
Guard 1: Hell yeah we are!
Librarian: You know about the Stick Elf, too?
Archivist: Oh, totally. Stick-Elf's a super chill dude. Gave me some awesome pipeweed when I was maybe 12, and tee-bee-aitch I think I'm still a little buzzed from it.
Guard 1: What'd I tell ya, fuckin' dope pipeweed!
Archivist: Also he's really old.
Guard 1: Old as balls.
Librarian: Yeah, so Éodan and Jenniforomir were telling me.
Archivist: My grandpa used to tell me stories - he said one time he saw Stick Elf enter a smoke-ring contest.
Guard 1: Ooh, I'll bet he kicked fuckin' ass.
Archivist: Apparently the guy made an entire warship out of smoke and it flew around shooting down the other rings.
Librarian: And how much of this "fuckin' dope" pipeweed had your grandfather had by this point?
Guard 1: No no, that's totally plausible. Dude's got weird elf powers and shit for sure.
Archivist: He brought fireworks for the king's birthday one year, too.
Guard 1: Oh fuck, I forgot about those! Fuckin' incredible fireworks! Dragons and knights and glowy trees and shit! I was fuckin' 6 years old or something, they totally blew my mind. Hey Éodan, did you see that shit?
Guard 2: No, I think that's before I lived in Gondor.
Guard 1: Wait, you're not from here?
Guard 2: Oh, no, I grew up in Rohan. We moved here when I was, like, thirteen because my uncle Éojeff said he could get my dad a sweet job. And also that there were houses that didn't smell like horseshit.
Guard 1: Oh shit, are you related to Éojeff and Éosteve who run that æbleskiver stand on Norndîl St?
Guard 2: Yeah, they're my uncles!
Guard 1: Shit, they cook a fuckin' great æbleskiver!
Librarian: Ok, hold up a sec, "Stick Elf" can't possibly be his real name.
Guard 1: Why not?
Librarian: What? You think his parents named him in the hopes that he would carry around a fucking tree when he got older?
Guard 2: Maybe they gave him the tree when he was born!
Archivist: I don't think a baby could carry that stick.
Guard 1: You ever seen a baby hanging onto something? They're hella strong.
Archivist: It's not a strength thing, their hands are tiny. That staff is enormous!
Guard 1: My halberd's bigger 'n I am, I can hold it just fine.
Archivist: You're not a baby.
Librarian: Also why would elf parents name their kid "stick ELF"?! Presumably they know that their kid's going to be an elf!
Archivist: Is he actually an elf? I didn't think they grew beards.
Guard 1: How'd he get old as balls if he's not an elf?
Guard 2: His ears aren't that pointy. Maybe he's just a really old guy? Like, a Numémoriam or something?
Guard 1: Did you just say "Numémoriam"?
Guard 2: Nûnenorman? Munimõrbitan? Y'know, those guys like the king that can get super old.
Guard 1: You mean the fuckin' Númenóreans?
Guard 2: Yeah, the Númenóreums.
Archivist: Even the Númenóreans don't live THAT long.
Guard 1: Plus he carries that fuckin' stick around.
Guard 2: Wait, what does the stick have to do with it?
Guard 1: That's an elf thing. Y'know, trees and shit? Very elfy.
Librarian: Ok, look, but his parents naming him "Stick Elf" would be weird whether or not he's an elf. In fact, it's even weirder if he's not - what human names their kid "elf"?
Archivist: Huh. Yeah, you're right, he probably does have another name.
Guard 2: Yeah, I guess so.
Librarian: He's been coming here for decades and nobody's ever asked his real name?
Archivist: I dunno what to tell you, he's Stick Elf. Even his library card just says 'Stick Elf'.
Guard 1: Fuck yeah, the Stick Elf!
Guard 2: Maybe we could, like, ask him his name sometime?
Guard 1: Hey, look, Elrond's over there. He's old as balls too, maybe he knows?
Guard 2: Oh, we shouldn't interru-
Guard 1: HEY ELROND, YOU'RE OLD AS BALLS, RIGHT? WHAT'S THAT OLD ELF WITH THE STICK'S NAME?
Elrond (coming over): Do you mean an old man cloaked all in grey and blue, leaning on a rough-cut staff, who came to the great library this day?
Guard 1: Yeah, the Stick-Elf!
Guard 2: (Sorry to bother you, sir...)
Librarian: He's got to have a real name besides 'the Stick Elf', right?
Elrond: Indeed, for no elf is he. You speak of the wizard Olórin, wisest of the Maiar, older even than Eä itself. Many are his names in many countries: Tharkûn among the Dwarves; Incánus to the south; Mithrandir he is called among my people, the Grey Pilgrim.
Librarian: Oh.
Elrond: And here in the North he is called Stick-Elf.
Librarian: Oh.
Guard 1: Fuck yeah!
Stop posting workplace conversations on main
the thing about copyright abolition is that. what makes theft bad is that something is taken away from its rightful owner. in this sense, copyright infringement is literally not theft, because making a copy of something doesn't tangibly cause the original owner to lose anything that they would otherwise have. copyright enforcement, on the other hand, does take away people's access to what should be theirs. anyone who makes art while employed by a corporation and is unable to sell their work because it does not belong to them, anyone who's been sued by a pop musician for making music that sounds vaguely similar if you don't allow the jury to listen to the actual songs, these people have far more in common with victims of theft than anyone whose copyright has been infringed
>anyone who makes art while employed by a corporation and is unable to sell their work because it does not belong to them
I don't buy that this is an issue with copyright law. This is an issue with the amount of power corporations hold and how easily that can extract value from workers without giving them their share. The problem here doesn't come from copyright existing, it comes from companies having the power to write into all creative's contracts "if you make something while working for us we own 100% of the copyrights instead of you" and then being able to cut the worker out of profits of that work.
If, when a company made a million dollars off of a worker's art, the creator got a majority of that money, or if the worker maintained a percentage of the rights to the work then this problem you're describing would go away without any change to copyright law. This isn't even a copyright specific issue. If I, while working at an insurance company, figure out some heuristic or process that lets me process claims twice as quickly and bring it to the company to and makes it part of the standard workflow then the company doubles their productivity and I get nothing (maybe a one time bonus or small raise if I'm lucky). It's the same issue and copyright never came into it.
Even if copyright, as a legal framework, was abolished tomorrow, the day afterwards Disney and the like would just add a clause to all their worker's contracts effectively making them sign away permission to sell their own copies of the work that was functionally, for the worker, exactly the same situation they had under copyright in this regard because they would still have the power and money to enforce that as a standard of employment contracts which is the actual source of this problem. The industries power to create grossly unfair agreements between workers and employers with clauses like "we get 100% of the copyright to your work".
"see the problem here is that you have a legal tool that allows you to sue, demand money and censor people who make art similar enough to yours, and that is a good thing! but your employers can choerce you into giving away that power to them, so they can use it for themselves, even against you. and thats a bad thing because the power to sue, extort and censor should be rightfully yours, that weapon is your god given right and noone should be allowed to take it away from you"
Reblogged hbmmaster
i dislike it when someone is facing obviously disproportionate scrutiny for their actions because they are trans or Black or so on and people immediately leap to focusing on defending their actions and litigating the specifics, which cedes the implicit point that if they really did Do The Thing the response they are facing would be justified and often—unless their innocence is actually watertight—presents an extremely easy way for an interlocutor to score points on you while at the same time not meaningfully addressing the double standard
like how many times on here has a girl been banned on here and everyone jumped to say "she was banned for no reason, she never broke ToS", and then immediately been made to look foolish by the tranmisogynistic harassment crew who've made dedicated e-stalking blogs for her showing up with a screenshot of one time she suicide baited an anon or whatever. and there was literally no reason to set yourself up for that interaction when you literally could have started and ended with the existence of the mass stalking and harassment campaign !
Reblogged
The tgirl Petra Parker Spider-Man stuff having J Jonah Jameson be a hashtag trans ally is fun, but it feels like it misses the point of Spider-Man as much as modern cis Spider-Man stuff misses the point by having Spider-Mans be beloved by cops or besties with billionaires.
Spider-Man's whole thing was that he was broke as shit, hated by the press, hated by the cops, and that those in power have an obligation to improve society. All of that should resonate as a tgirl. Feels goofy to back away from it.
Reblogged gildedorthovyn
I've always written everything by hand before typing. Staring at a blank word document doesn't inspire the words to come.
But a blank paper and a blue pen and the words come at a steady pace.
aaaand here's a link to the paper :)
There's a pretty damning commentary on this paper: https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2024.1517235/full
In short:
- they didn't actually measure changes in learning; they measured theta waves which don't have a clear link to learning
- They evaluated adults, not children
- They didn't have participants do any encoding activities; they were mindlessly typing the same thing over and over
- They didn't allow participants to actually type; they had them 'type' with one finger of their right hand, when there's plenty of evidence that using both hands while encoding information leads to increased brain activity.
- They couldn't see what they were typing (no visual feedback), so any error-correction processes the brain would usually run were impaired
- The handwriting part of the experiment was completely normal and representative of using handwriting to record information.
- They didn't actually report the raw data or conduct any statistical analysis for the two parts of the experiment individually; only the differences between the two groups.
Honestly, that is....shockingly bad. Like I'm surprised this passed peer review and it makes me wonder about the journal. Of course educational science is a joke of a field anyway with little scientific rigour over the last 50 years, so maybe that's not surprising. But this sure as hell sounds like this researcher walked into this project already convinced that handwriting is better for children's learning than typing and screens, and then rigged an experiment to support that bias. If I were the editor I would retract the paper, not just include a link to the commentary.
Reblogged
mother please caress me (broken diaspora, I miss home)
the unnamed Yoruba ancestor, victim of colonialism, taken from her home, comforts me. we are the same and different simultaneously. my home isn't here and she is still with me.
i feel like I don't see myself often in a lot of art especially pieces related to the diaspora and black heritage. it makes me happy to create art like this! I want everyone to see this love.
this is probably a safe-ish place to write this but basically i have no money. my girlfriend just got laid off for absolutely no reason and i'm terrified she will be evicted. i've been on the verge of suicide, suffering from PTSD and other somatic conditions like muscle spasms. also hallucinations and psychosis. i've been suffering for a long time now and i'm on the verge of ODing. my name is maria, also known as angel, i've been poor and sick for my entire life. wakefulness feels like a violation. i wish for death, for and end to my suffering. my home country keeps going down the drain, neither my father nor my mother have financial security. everything is so expensive. i've been drugged on anti-depressants, benzos, and anti-psychotics for a year now. i've gained a lot of weight and suffered from hormonal imbalances and other things. i cannot sleep. my sleep is a combination of sleep-paralysis with hallucinations, i live for months in dreams every night then wake up, robbed of everything, not rested, not healthy, still tired. i cannot afford clothes, i cannot afford food, i cannot get a job because EVERY disability aid in my country has been severed by our libertarian fascist government. i black out, i go into verbal shutdown, i scream and i tremble like an animal. my arms and legs are covered in gashes, because the only thing that brings me pleasure is my dull swiss army knife. and my girlfriend. her name is eva. but i don't think we will ever have a future together. if any random stranger, anyone, wants to send me money, please do. i am working on a game called MOONLIGHT, a haunting trek through a horrible story that contends with the cyclical nature of videogame narratives. it has a hero with no heart. it has a villain with no maliciousness. a husk and a manticore, stuck in a death dance, forever. my name is angel. and i'm at my wit's end.
thanks to those of you who spread this around and contributed, it helps a bit, although i still have little to no money. things have gotten worse since i wrote this, i'm currently out of estrogen due to a shortage. to make things worse, my mom's house has water damage and it broke the electrical installation, she has no power and also no water. i have no water either until things are fixed. i've been overdosing on benzos to cope with stuff but i'm at the end of my rope haha.
Reblogged chuunifox
There is one who knows this power, though the price may be too great to bear...
Reblogged komsomolka
U all need to get more comfortable with doms and/or tops being assertive and owning their desires rather than shying away from wanting to be an active participant in sex and kink. Because it's all fine when a bottom and/or sub says "I want this done to me" but when we tops and/or doms say "I want to do this to someone" suddenly it's an issue. Why do you as a pervert even have pearls to clutch...
Repeat after me:
Transmisandry does not exist.
Trans men are not systematically oppressed for being trans men.
They are systematically oppressed for being trans.
That is literally transphobia.
So that means that transwomen are not oppressed for being trans women, but just for being trans, right?
Trans women are oppressed for being women & for being trans.
Why would a conversation about how trans men aren’t oppressed for being men “mean” anything when it comes to trans women?
This is literally “soo if unicorns don’t exist then neither do horses!!! CHECKMATE SJW” logic.
incense-witch-deactivated201812
Transmisogyny is literally the cross section/overlap of transphobia and misogyny. Therefore, transmisandry is the cross section of transphobia and misandry. And we all know misandry doesn’t exist, soo….
11 years ago