My PT gave me the following tips; please use them carefully and don't push yourself to where you hurt yourself more than you relax yourself:
Do each ten times, and only to the point where the pain is not "this is WRONG" pain but "okay this stretch is manageable":
slowly open wide and close your mouth
slowly push your lower jaw forward and back again
slowly shift your lower jaw to the left, to the right, and back to center again
I usually slowly count to three or for for each movement, and try to time it with nice slow breathing. So, slowly open wide & breathe in (ideally through the nose though, if you can) while counting to three or four, then slowly close & breathe out while counting to three or four. Fluid, continuous movements, not jerky ones, and be gentle and don't force things.
My PT said this is to help the jaw muscles remember how they *can* move. He recommended massages too! He said if your jaw clicks while doing those moves, it's not worrisome in and of itself, but if the click is accompanied by pain, ease up on how much you move your jaw, or stop with the move that caused the click, and try one of the others.
AFTERWARDS (and you really do need to do the movements of the first list first!!)
loosen your lower jaw (your teeth must not touch), put the knuckles of your left hand to the left side of your lower jawbone, and gently push towards your right, to stretch the left side of your jaw muscles. Hold for a count of five to ten slow breaths - for me, I notice a shift in the muscles, to where they let loose a bit, around the seventh or eighth breath; see how this works for you.
do the same with the right hand pushing left.
extend the thumb and first finger of your stronger hand to an L shape. Put it on your chin so that the chin protrusion is below the "hinge" of the L. Open your mouth slowly, and then use your hand to open it a bit wider and stretch the opening muscles on both sides. Hold for five to ten slow breaths. For a second step, you can add resistance: push your lower jaw upwards while at the same time pushing downwards with your hands. Only small incremements!!! LIke, fractions of inches! And only for one or two seconds, before you release again.
Please be careful and gentle with all these steps. No jerky motions, don't go past the "okay stretch" point to the "fuck this HURTS" point, and if you have a history of dislocating your jaw, please proceed carefully or skip this entirely and only do the movements described in the first list.
I often do these in bed at night, or randomly while I watch TV or something, or take a break at work to do them (my co-workers are used to it by now 😅).
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Concerning (things about) Hobbits: Meeting the Big Man
One of the most important characters in Lord of the Rings is someone you like and trust. You quote him often, remember him fondly, and rely on his word.
You don't know his name. Fanart is nonexistent; there’s no Ao3 tag, no breakout film portrayal, no Amazon money-milking series for this character. You know his voice, have memorised his words; you've probably never read any meta about him.
I'll bet I’m the only person you've seen on Tumblr who really talks about That Fucking Guy, and I hate that man with a cold academic passion. (I also love him. He's my blorbo. He could be yours.)
I think you shouldn't trust him as much as you do.
Here is why.
This book is largely concerned with Hobbits, and from its pages a reader may discover much of their character and a little of their history...
That is the first sentence of The Fellowship of the Ring.
The prologue of the Lord of the Rings is iconic. Swept away by the story, we forget we’re reading at all. It's understandable. Who can resist the overwhelming charm of the writer, and the bewildering excitement of being taken by the hand and invited into The Fellowship of the Ring.
But even people with deeper takes on Tolkien tend to miss the significance of the Prologue. It’s a place where critical reading abilities and political processors usually turn off entirely - fair enough, it's probably a relief.
Let's talk about the Narrator.
Meeting the Narrator: Time, Place, Person
The Prologue is narrated by a Mannish (Big Folk) Narrator, a modern human being, from an accessible academic standpoint. We are encouraged to think of him as Friendly Professor Tolkien, although you really do need to remember that he is clearly addressing us from within a fictional narrative world. He is a character. Even if he is Tolkien’s self-insert, intended to be read as Tolkien Himself, he is still a character who can be analysed and interpreted. This is a fictional character.
The Big Man deliberately addresses the reader as someone with a shared background, in what is presumably somewhere in the early-to-mid twentieth century. It is stated multiple times that you (reader) and Narrator are both Big Folk together - there is no chance that you, the Reader, are a scholar of another race.
It is plain indeed that in spite of later estrangement Hobbits are relatives of ours: far nearer to us than Elves, or even than Dwarves.
Pick out the “later estrangement” and park it for now.
The casting of the Narrator is a deliberate alignment with Professor Tolkien, and we are certainly intended to understand him as an academic, avuncular, rather unworldly male professor in the British Isles.
(Sidebar: for convenience I gender the Narrator as male. I think there's evidence for the Narrator being intended as male-by-default, which can be provided on request, and I personally feel the Big Man narrator is the translator/propagator of the silly convention of referring to modern humans as “capital-M Men.” )
The Prologue is written charmingly, a framing device of an academic translator giving the context of background information before presenting someone else’s text (the translated Red Book, etc). Later, this Prologue connects to the Appendices in The Return of the King, where the Narrator returns in his persona of the translator of the works. Our Narrator is certainly a strong, influential, deliberate character, with a specific and distinctive voice!
Anyway, whether or not you choose to picture the Big Man Narrator as Tolkien Himself doing a folksy Bit, OR as a character Tolkien created - Remember! The entire story is fiction and the Big Man Narrator is a created fictional character. Why would you assume he is telling the truth? Why assume that he is an expert? Where are his biases?
Look what the Big Man Narrator actually says. Look at what he chooses to tell, and what he finds unimportant. There are so, so many posts that pick over the fascinating bits of Concerning Hobbits, mining canon for more information, as if it is a pure source of truth. I suggest that the next time you do, you try this fun exercise.
Before we go into the Magic Thing, the narrator also notes AGAIN that hobbits exist today, but are shorter than they were;
They seldom now reach three feet; but they have dwindled, they say, and in ancient days they were taller.
This continues and reinforces the framing of “hobbits still exist now,” and sounds rather as if the Big Man has interviewed modern hobbits (“they say,”) which we’ll also park.
We move on, parking "it's assumed you're a Man, receiving information from a Mannish professor", the "future estrangement" and "diminished hobbits are available for interview."
The Magic Thing
I was provoked into writing this by a fun Tumblr post pointing out that "hobbits are said to 'not study magic' - does that mean that they don't HAVE magic?" which went off into a separate and funnier reblog chain.
I want to analyse this again, noting that this is information received from Big Man.
Let’s examine the “hobbit magic thing” noting that we are being TOLD all of this by a CHARACTER.
Here’s how the passage about "hobbit magic" starts.
Hobbits are an unobtrusive but very ancient people, more numerous formerly than they are today;
In our time, we’ve just been told, hobbits still exist, but had a population drop and are vanishing. To the point where a reader is not expected to have ever heard of them. Chillingly, in typical mid century British academic fashion, the Big Folk Narrator assumes that the reader is also British; when he later mentions that the remaining hobbits only live in the British Isles, it’s a little alarming. There’s a species of humans native to these islands, so rare and so politically silent that you’ve never seen or heard of them.
Hello?!
for they love peace and quiet and good tilled earth: a well-ordered and well-farmed countryside was their favourite haunt.
We are told here that Hobbits are going extinct because they cannot readily survive due to, essentially, habitat destruction. (we feel the Narrator’s annoyance about the Industrial Revolution spoiling the “peace and quiet” strongly here, more strongly than the buried implications for indigenous people).
They no longer have any land. Not only have they lost the Shire, they have no towns, small villages or even farms. “Was” is very much past-tense, and they “haunted” land in the past, ghosting lightly and leaving no traces of their presence, rather than living there. so in our modern day there’s certainly no Shire, no Bree (mixed human/hobbit town) and no Michel Delving, which in its time was a market town with above-ground buildings and a museum. For context, it takes a decent amount of work for the British Isles to lose towns, especially on the level of development that Hobbits had - famously anachronistic, they have waistcoat buttons and watermills and good china and museums and smoking habits, while all the rest of medieval-ish Middle Earth is not as developed.
It’s hard to lose all that, without any trace at all, in crowded countries. Wholesale loss always means that Something Happened.
They do not and did not understand or like machines more complicated than a forge-bellows, a water-mill, or a hand-loom, though they were skilful with tools.
“Do not and did not” is further reinforcement of a still-living people. (I love the “understand or like” thing, which is charming - the implication that hobbits are perfectly capable of UNDERSTANDING machinery in textile factories, but would hate it.)
Something that makes the Big Man nuanced as a character is that he obviously adores hobbits, and studies them because he likes them. The fondness and admiration comes through, even as he is showing his own privilege and bias.
To me, the way this passage about machinery is framed - lumping together those machines as “about the level of technology hobbits are comfortable with” - is something that someone standing post-Enlightenment, probably post-Industrial Revolution, would do. The implication I take from this passage is that this is a modern writer describing the current status of modern hobbits; a mid-century British scholar, a self-insert of Tolkien.
This sense of time matters, because of everything else he says, and the temptation people will have to excuse the Big Man narrator as “a product of his time.” This isn’t a medieval writer looking back on Middle Earth. It’s a highly educated man writing in the 1940s: computers existed, there were several Disney films out, women had the right to vote, and feminist essays were published from Tolkien's own workplace.
Even in ancient days they were, as a rule, shy of ‘the Big Folk’, as they call us,
We then proceed to see, across three books, examples of hobbit behavior in “the ancient days”, which may serve as an example of this shyness. Several different relationship with Big Folk are outlined, in which fairly chirpy hobbits, characterised by their ready emotional availability, cohesion, and incredible abilities to build relationships and form massive political alliances, seem to do well on the strength of that. Hobbit shyness may involve glaring ferociously at Big Folk for a moment, but within a few days they are sitting on your lap, and then it’s all over. With this evidence in our memory, casting a coy “shyness” as the reason for their avoidance of “us” becomes uncomfortable.
and now they avoid us with dismay and are becoming hard to find.
The Narrator is handwaving, in avuncular fashion, why the Reader has never seen a hobbit in their lives, and needs to be lectured, from first principles, on a living indigenous people of the British Isles. Do marinate on it for a moment, though. The tone of a professor or a parent, whimsically explaining to Victorian children why you don’t see the Tooth Fairy - she hides! Teehee.
They avoid us with dismay.
Behind this airy statement, what happened? Massive betrayals, the loss of their land and political power, loss of the conditions they need for their survival, massive loss of their people, and a total breakdown in trust. Humans and hobbits, in the prologue and main story, are shown as natural allies; close kin who understand each other well; humans are shown owing a tremendous amount of their own political influence to hobbits, and even cold/reserved humans end up liking them after a conversation. Hobbits are especially shown for being loyal friends who do not break down under war; noted for retaining cohesion and resisting corruption; who, under unimaginable conditions, will still resist harming or betraying friends.
Hobbits and humans have clearly had some significant breakage of our kinship since the events of the LotR cycle. The Big Man knows this.
Earlier in the essay, when the Big Man told us that “hobbits are closest to (us)” he gave us a lot of additional information, didn’t he? He refers to “later estrangement.” (He also tells us clearly, in that subtext of that sentence, that no hobbit will ever read the book in our hands, no hobbit will ever be addressed as a reader, no hobbit will enter academia, no hobbit will be able to fill in the gaps that the Big Man waves his hand over. Certainly no hobbit scholar contributed to the Big Man’s translation of the Red Book. They’re not just going, they’re functionally GONE. This is what I mean!) Anyway, even the Big Man notes that there was “an estrangement.” Something that has caused them to flee from contact with us in dismay.
whatever happened in that estrangement probably doesn’t reflect well on the Big Folk. A species facing extinction and hiding, dismayed and estranged, from their closest kin, is not having a pleasant time on this earth. Especially when we understand that they’re basically trapped in the crowded and inhospitable British Isles (and still managing to hide from us to the point of the public not being aware of their existence!)
The Big Man Narrator isn’t interested. This is the point where you ought to start wondering about academic bias on the part of the Big Man Narrator. He's fond of hobbits, and has interviewed/met them, but would never treat one as a colleague.
[…]They possessed from the first the art of disappearing swiftly and silently, when large folk whom they do not wish to meet come blundering by; and this art they have developed until to Men it may seem magical.
so hobbits have an inherent ability of being invisible/undetectable, which they still practice today (teehee, that’s why it’s okay that you’ve never spoken to one) and which is pretty damn effective. Effective enough that people in modern times are completely fooled, effective enough that it still counts as “disappearing,” and the elusiveness of hobbits is so perfect as to conceal their existence from the general public. Effective enough that the few adults who DO discuss hobbits could conceivably think it could be magic. The Narrator has probably rolled his eyes over a rival’s paper about “Slipping Into The Shadow-Realm: how hobbits shift space and time to conceal their vital signatures” (Sayers, 1934).
further, they’ve specifically developed this “art” - from what’s implied to be an instinctive/animal ability - to a higher skill, indistinguishable from magic. The “art” is SOMETHING material and quantifiable, if it was innate-and-continually-developed.
But Hobbits have never, in fact, studied magic of any kind,
Here is a point that’s been discussed on tumblr, and it is correct to note that “studied” is doing a lot of work. Especially when contrasted against the previous sentence, with the interesting term “art”. “It isn’t science/magic, it’s an instinctive art”.
To me - remembering that this is intended to be a mid-century British academic speaking to us - it resonates with how romanticism of marginalised cultures was treated by academia, in the generation the Big Man Narrator would’ve studied in - full of romantic, unexamined, politically revealing statements like, “The Celts are skilled in the art of music, but have never properly studied it.”
What I’m saying here is that we should not assume the Big Man is a good judge of the difference between “art” and “study,” especially since the next bit reads:
and their elusiveness is due solely to a professional skill that heredity and practice, and a close friendship with the earth, have rendered inimitable by bigger and clumsier races.
Hobbit invisibility is an “art” through “heredity,” but also a “professional skill” refined through “practice.” It has been “developed” until it is mistaken for “magic,” but against this, we are told that hobbits “have never studied magic of any kind.” In the cleavage point here, we can see the definition of “study” that The Big Man is working with. This definition is possibly what makes something “magic” or not. Have you seen this before?
The point I am making here is that the Big Man is speaking to us from the position of a “coloniser.” There are some worldbuilding implications to unpack from this. One is that the Big Man is speaking from a place where magic can be studied, not even requiring hereditary aptitude (if hobbits were excluded from magic by physiology, This Fuckin Guy would’ve said it) but that it is an academic practice. Hobbits are not just nearly-extinct and terrified out of contact with humans; they are fully excluded from academia (they do not translate or contribute to translations of their histories; they do not study) and if they cannot formalise their practices in acceptable study as the Big Man defines it, it cannot be magic. This is exactly the tone in which majority cultures dismiss other practices of culture/medicine/science, by stating it is NOT a form of science, because it is not practiced with the academy, because it is definitionally not allowed in the academy.
We can then go to a higher level of political analysis and reading, and ask: who benefits from a definition of “magic” that includes (academic study) but excludes (hobbit arts)?
You can certainly do some delightful worldbuilding answers for yourself, and say that “perhaps magic is spells, material changes, great works as performed by Elvish or Maiar Ringbearers, etc.” But if we look at the political stuff I’ve just pointed out, why not examine the definition and who it serves and why? Given that we’ve seen this pattern before - colonisers deliberately bundle, define and dismiss marginalised practices as primitive, animalistic, instinctual and unschooled, as part of the PURPOSEFUL WORK of colonisation - I read the Big Man definition as: “Magic is formalised by the bigger races and defined by excluding the practices of the smallest race.”
Who does this benefit? Well, the Bigger Races could in some ways. Magic must be studied, hobbits don’t study, hobbits don’t have magic, hobbits are The Only Unmagical Humans - despite having practices indistinguishable from magic - this could be something. Big Men would have some reason to define “magic” to exclude hobbits. Normally this is done in order to take resources or drain resistance from marginalised people, but as hobbits have had virtually no remaining resources or resistance since long before the Industrial Revolution, you could open this up to other worldbuilding implications - maybe, Big Men didn’t really MIND hobbits going extinct.
An interesting point here is to re-read sections of this work with different interpretations of who the Big Man is. Where are his biases? Who is he as a character?
I personally read him as a friendly, Tolkienesque academic who likes hobbits, follows his linguistic interests, and is too blinded by his bias to think about their political position. He seems unaware of the horrors he's talking about. Perhaps that's down to innocence.
A character crying out to be analysed.
Landless and Dismayed
That sums up a lot of information that can be mined from one of the very first paragraphs of the Fellowship of the Ring. But here's another message to toy with - hobbits exist in the modern space; landless, estranged, fleeing from us in dismay. Quite likely to have been betrayed.
If you personally were placed in Guild Wars, what class would you be?
Reblogs with comments highly encouraged! Putting your thoughts outside of the tags means we can all engage with each other, and find other thoughts we find provoking!
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confiscating cis peoples gender until they can learn to be normal about it. sorry you spent too much time talking about how men and women are 'supposed' to act, you're getting put in nonbinary time out. sit on the naughty step. no gender until dinner time.
Janthir is a very chill and fun expac, so while getting the spear is super fun -the warclaw is probably the most fun i have had on mounts in a while - the homestead is literally so chill - the first two Maps are ao relaxing if you enjoy the vibe.
However, spear should be super duper easy to get if that is all you want!
Honestly there are few things funnier to me than the fact norn are native to Tyria, and then one day foreign gods roll up and introduce their pet little species to the planet like rabbits to Australia and these invasive aliens just happen to look like miniature thin norn for absolutely no reason whatsoever
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Mountain King
Artist: Jeff Laubenstein
World of Warcraft the Roleplaying game: Alliance player's guide, p. 56 (2006)
The most respected and revered of the Ironforge dwarves’ warriors, mountain kings represent mighty champions of their race. While some Ironforge dwarves are enamored of the new firearms, and others unlock the secrets of their titan heritage, mountain kings
continue a legacy that has existed for millennia. This is a legacy of beer, blood, booze and thunder, of red-glinting axes and crushing hammers. It is a legacy continued by some of Ironforge’s most renowned heroes, including Muradin Bronzebeard, deceased brother of King Magni of Ironforge.
Mountain kings boast prodigious combat abilities. They are ferocious in melee combat, wielding the traditional weapons of their race to decimate their foes. Their attacks leave opponents stunned and reeling. They have long known of a powerful spark within every Ironforge dwarf — and the mountain kings draw upon this spark and fan it into a raging flame. They conjure magic hammers and axes to hurl at their targets, stunning and slowing them so they can get close enough to use their real weapons. They transform themselves into silver-sheened creatures of living stone, shrugging off all attacks and hacking through flesh and bone with frightening ease.
Note: The RPG is non-canon, but Muradin was indeed considered dead from WCIII until the release of Wrath of the Lich King
Why do the shopkeepers in Skyrim follow you outside if you exit before they finish saying whatever dialogue they're directing at you and then go back into their shops and lock the door and close shop but if you pick the lock and go back in they're just standing at the counter like they're open but it counts as trespassing and they're all like "can't a woman get a moment to herself?!" ????????
You, a fiend, enter their shop. Happy to have a customer, they start chatting and hoping you'll buy some stuff.
You, mayhaps having bought things, mayhaps not, decide to, as a troublesome little rascal, LEAVE, in the MIDDLE OF THEIR SENTENCE. Like, they are talking to you, they are still talking! And you just, turn around, open the door, leave. Not even a little "goodbye!" or "thank you!".
So they follow you out, look at you with disgust, put out a "closed for the day" sign and lock it behind them as they enter. Because fuck you.
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Been working on getting my candle business up and running.
I will have candles inspired by skyrim (morthal is fog and fern and sandlewood, whiterun is dragonsblood and leather. They both smell amazing.) Also will have another line of candles called IYKYK and I'll start grabbing photos of them today
Based on a conversation my partner @riderdrauggrim and I had once in which we posited that Dwarven babies hatch out of geodes that are mined up from deep under ground.
I debated giving the baby a beard, but it just looked odd.