I don't know who I am either

Because she was there. She was there from the BEGINNING. She grew up in the Undying Lands in the light of the Two Trees. She even LEFT the Undying Lands because she could pretty plainly see there was no chance to build great kingdoms or new things there. 

She helped lead her people across the grinding ice after Fëanor and his sons abandoned them. She lived in Doriath at its height, her brother created Nargothrond at its height, the peak of cooperation between Khazâd and Quendi, her cousin built Gondolin. 

And she watched all of it die. 

She lost her brothers, two to war and one to torture and then being half-eaten by a demon-wolf in the depths of Sauron’s first stronghold. She saw Thingol murdered and Melian wrecked. She saw her brother’s shining Nargothrond fall to Glaurung and become a desecrated pit of hell. She saw her cousins die, one by one; then she saw her cousins turn on her own people (again) and murder over half of them. 

She saw all of the lands she’d known wrecked and destroyed: some polluted and destroyed by Morgoth, some destroyed in the War of Wrath. She saw Khazad-dûm polluted and destroyed by the Balrog. She saw Númenor - whose royal line were also her kin, via Turgon and Idril - polluted, turned into a brutal hideous empire and tyranny, and then sunk. 

She saw Celebrimbor, her young cousin, try to make the rings as tools to make the world better - and saw Sauron use and betray him, and then come back and utterly destroy his kingdom, slaughtering his people, who fled to her, to Thranduil, and to Elrond. She saw Gil-galad’s last kingdom and the very Pyrrhic victory in Mordor, followed by the slow but unstoppable decay of what she in Lorien, Thranduil in Greenwood or Elrond in Imladris could actually protect. 

Then she saw her only child captured by orcs and held captive and tortured and gods know what else until Celebrien was incapable of staying in Middle Earth - not for her children, or her husband, or her parents. She saw the rise of the Necromancer and his unmasking. 

She has bled and lost and grieved for thousands of years. Not a single person she came to Middle-Earth with still survives. Celeborn is the only person she loved she has ever got to keep with her, and she met him there. She couldn’t even keep her own child safe. 

And now she’s being offered the One Ring, the source of more power than even Melian had (and Melian was strong enough for the Girdle to protect Doriath from Melkor). She’s being offered the one thing that exists that could even possibly let her change that, make that not so. The only thing that exists that could keep the final end of all of that being the death of Lorien, the loss of Imladris, the loss of everything she ever wanted or worked for. 

Without the Ring, she was strong enough to hold Sauron off. With the Ring she could have erased him. She would have been stronger than Lúthien, who enchanted even Melkor. She could make the whole world like Lothlorien. And Frodo is offering it to her. 

More than that, he’s asking her to take it. He’s saying “I’m too weak, I’m too small, I’m tired, I’m scared, it hurts, I don’t want it. Please say you want it and I will give it to you.” 

And she says no. She doesn’t take it. She doesn’t ask for it. 

She accepts that everything she has ever done is going to die. That she will be forgotten, that her people’s home will decay and disintegrate, that nothing she made or anyone she ever loved made will endure. 

She fights the war that comes afterwards (and the movies ALSO mislead like fuck on that: Lothlorien and Rivendell were both under MAJOR siege during the war and a LOT of people died, and that should be even scarier: that Sauron fully felt he had the power to attack not JUST Gondor, but at the same time the Golden Wood, Imladris, the Lonely Mountain … and in all of them come so close to winning that it’s only the Ring’s destruction that saves the world; that’s how strong he was) in order to make sure that this will happen. That exactly the thing that will be the final nail in the coffin - the destruction of the Ring - will come to pass. 

And then goes back to the Undying Lands as an exile returning on sufferance, alone, because Celeborn can’t bring himself to leave yet. 

Elrond’s story is just about as tragic, and the thing is, this is the context of their last acts: throwing themselves at the war, at death, at the destruction of everything they love, because it’s the only chance that the people who come after them will get anything better than brutal slavery to the Enemy. They don’t get to keep shit. Elrond even loses his daughter - permanently, because her soul goes wherever human souls go. He’s already lost his twin brother like that. 

And despite what everyone draws as parallels, Aman isn’t “Heaven”. There’s no guarantee of healing or happiness there. It’s more likely than in Middle-Earth, but Fëanor’s mother effectively died of exhaustion, and even Nienna, one of the Valier herself, lives in permanent shattered mourning for the desecration and suffering of the world. Even as Frodo’s offered the right to go there the wording is always may. 

His wounds and weariness may be healed. Not will be. But may be. 

There’s no guarantee that Celebrien is there waiting for her mother or her husband when they get there: she may still be the wreck she was when she left Middle Earth. There’s no guarantee of anything. 

The Millennium will always be Not That Long Ago. Everything since the Millennium will always be, in some sense, ‘new’.

You can listen to a Top 40 station now and hear a song from 10 years ago easily, even songs from the 80s or 90s on special occasions (which might just be the Nineties at Noon or whatever every single day).

A Top 40 station in the 80s? Played the current fucking Top 40 and that was it. You were lucky if you heard a song that was one year old, definitely never ten. I was born in 1979 and heard almost no music from before I was born until high school or college. If you wanted to hear anything older than a year, you had to listen to a classic rock (late 60s to 70s) or oldies (50s to early 60s) station. There was nothing earlier than that on the radio.

A restaurant was playing What a Feeling, from 1983. 28 years before my son was born. That’s the equivalent of hearing a song from 1951 in the late 80s, which just did not happen. Even for an oldies station, it was hard to find anything that old.

VCRs were just getting big in the mid-80s, but there was a limited selection of videos you could buy (or even rent) for them. Most video rental stores didn’t bother to stock TV shows, it just wasn’t worth it. (Few shows were even released on VHS.)

So you could generally watch recent movies and “classics” but if you were looking for some random movie from the mid-70s - that’s only ten years previous - you were mostly out of luck. Imagine looking for a movie from 2006 right now, and you can find maybe the top-grossing ones and a few that won Oscars, but Night at the Museum? The Devil Wears Prada? You’re shit outta luck. That’s what it would have been like looking for movies from 1976 in 1989.

So for those of us who grew up in the 80s and early 90s, pop culture had a hard limit of about a decade, if that. By the late 90s, the internet was good enough that music was starting to stretch that, but you still couldn’t really get video through the internet and DVDs were still catching up in terms of what was available. You didn’t really get entire seasons of TV on DVD until the early 00s - the first season of The Simpsons, which aired in 1989, wasn’t released on DVD until 2001.

The writer of two of the most well known stories worldwide, The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Cristo was a black man. 

chose to take on his slave grandmother’s last name, Dumas, like his father did before him.

grew up too poor for formal education, so was largely self-taught, including becoming a prolific reader, multilingual, well-travelled, and a foodie, resulting in his writing both a combination encyclopedia/cookbook (which just— is fucking outrageous to me) AND the adaptation of The Nutcracker on which Tchaikovsky based his ballet

he also wrote a LOOOOT of nonfiction and fiction about history, politics, and revolution, bc he was pro-monarchy, but a radical cuss, and that got him in a lot of hot water at home and abroad.

even beyond that, he generally put up with a lot of racist bullshit in France, so he went and wrote a novel about colonialism and a BLATANTLY self-insert anti-slavery vigilante hero (which he then cribbed from to write the Count of Monte Cristo, the main character of which, Edmond Dantés, Dumas also based on himself).

(…a novel which also features a LOAD of PoC beyond the Count, and at LEAST one queer character, btw, bc EVERY MOVIE ADAPTATION OF ANYTHING BY DUMAS IS A LIE; seriously, at LEAST one of the four Musketeers is Black, y'all.)

famously, when some fuckshit or other wanted to come at Dumas with some anti-Black foolishness, Dumas replied, “My father was a mulatto, my grandfather was a Negro, and my great-grandfather a monkey. You see, Sir, my family starts where yours ends.”

for the bicentennial of his birthday, Pres. Jacques Cirac was like, “…sorry about the hella racism,” and had Dumas’s ashes reinterred at the Panthéon of Paris, bc if you’re gonna keep the corpses of the cream of the crop all together, Dumas’s more widely read and translated than literally everybody else.

and they are still finding stuff old dude wrote, seriously; like discovering “lost” works as recently as 2002, publishing stuff for the first time as recently as 2005.

ALSO IMPORTANT:

daddy general dumas was an immense fierce french warrior who was a 6 foot plus, stunningly gorgeous and charismatic Black gentleman 

he invaded egypt

the native egyptians said “is this napoleon? this must be napoleon. we for one welcome our majestic new overlord”

then napoleon showed up

napoleon has all the presence of yesterday’s plain Tesco hummus

the native egyptians were like “… no… no, we’ve thought very hard and we’ll have General Dumas actually”

this did not make napoleon happy

in fact it made him jealous

…and like this…

…while “Napoleon has all the presence of yesterday’s plain Tesco hummus“…

:-D

I suspect Alexandre Dumas would have laughed at that, because besides looking like someone who laughed a lot…

Giraffe Party on Facebook:

And yes, this is still the situation with ABA in January 2022.

More information about ABA is available at: https://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=1640064006204333&id=330649957145751

[Image Description - Screenshot of a blog post. Background is white, text is black sans-serif font. Text reads:

"I babysit a 7 year-old who attends an ABA school. Parents described it to me as 'the good kind' of ABA. Today I was in pain, and I guess it showed on my face. The child kept trying to use their hands to push the corners of my mouth up, while saying 'can you make a happy face?' They would say 'what's wrong with your face? Let's make it happy' and then try to move my mouth into a smile. I kept telling them I don't like the way that feels, I don't like it when people touch my face like that. They took my hands and put them on their face to show me what to do, to push on their face and force a smile. I said I didn't want to make them smile that way either. I asked why would you make someone's face smile with your hands? They said it was a game. I asked them where they played the game, they said 'at school'. I asked who plays the game? They said, 'my teachers'.

Imagine being 7 and being taught that you should always look happy, even when you're not. Imagine being taught this not just through example or reinforcement, but by being PHYSICALLY MANIPULATED.

ABA is still just about compliance. And this isn't the 70s or the 90s, it's January 2020. #YesAllABA"]

"He was a forced farm worker during the 1940s Nazi occupation of Norway, and often said that observing the Nazis had sparked his interest in human behavior.[5]"

Sometimes people claim that ABA is “good” when it doesn’t punish (“use aversives”) to train autistic children into compliance. Punishment is not the only problem with ABA, though.

Even when you use only “positive reinforcement” (which often includes talking to the child or acknowledging the child’s existence only when the child is compliant, only letting them play or have access to things they enjoy when they comply, etc.), the whole goal of ABA is to train children to comply with adults’ demands, no matter how much suffering that compliance causes.

Just give the thing two layers of explanation. One to explain the specific problem, and another one explaining the explanation. Have an example:

Plot hole 1: If the vampires can't stand daylight, why couldn't they just move around underground?

Solution 1: They can't go underground, the sewer system of the city is full of giant alligators who would eat them.

Well, that's a very quick and simple explanation, which sure opens up additional questions.

Plot hole 2: How and why the fuck are there alligators in the sewers? How do they survive, what do they eat down there when there's no vampires?

Solution 2: The nuns of the Underground Monastery feed and take care of them as a part of their sacred duties.

It takes exactly two layers to create an illusion that every question has an answer - that it's just turtles all the way down. And if you're lucky, you might even find that the second question's answer loops right back into the first one, filling up the plot hole entirely:

Plot hole 3: Who the fuck are the sewer nuns and what's their point and purpose?

Solution 3: The sewer nuns live underground in order to feed the alligators, in order to make sure that the vampires don't try to move around via the sewer system.

Here, look at the “defence of virginity” section

No clarification on whether he got to join the hunt, or if this was a punishment- because the famously misogynistic ancient Greeks would have likely seen it as such -but the myth does exist.