squeeze me for egg

This includes Stephen King (which coincides with his Twitter drama with Rowling from before), Margaret Atwood, Neil Gaiman, and more big names in the industry.

Look at those beautiful trans supportive authors!

The Google doc with the letter and a list of the authors who signed it can be found here:

Here is a link to an LA Times article:

And here is a link to the Guardian article:

I thought, given all the sincere disappointment I've heard from people who loved her books, at least this gives you an alternative source.

that this exists

that it’s also a step counter

The movies emphasize the magical control that the evil powers exercise over Theoden, but in the books, it's more obviously a depiction of bad kingship, in the British medieval sense. Theoden takes bad advice; he neglects his family; he fails to reward his knights; and he leaves his people vulnerable to attack. He also does not honor his kingdom's promises to help nearby kingdoms, as we can tell from Boromir's account of what Gondor has been going through.

Gandalf doesn't just cast out the curse and magically fix everything. He encourages Theoden to free himself from his bad advisor, but Theoden has to take all the subsequent steps. And those choices are not easy; after so much neglect, his knights are scattered, and his only option for defending his people is to gather them at Helm's Deep. The siege does not go well. His people are afraid and despairing. But nevertheless, he holds firm and charges out to meet the enemy -- and Gandalf literally meets him halfway, bringing with him the lost knights, whom Theoden welcomes and rewards after the battle.

Theoden could have just gone home after that. But when Gondor calls for aid, Theoden proves his worth by honoring his promises. He keeps his oaths not only to his people but to his allies.

And the climax of his redemption in the book is not his death, but his leadership. The ride of the Rohirrim against Sauron's armies is described in lavish detail, with an uncharacteristically heated pace: Theoden leads the entire line of Rohan, his banner streaming behind him in the wind as they race toward their foe. And that's the end of the chapter.

I love Theoden's arc so much, and especially that moment so much, because the message is not that he has to win battles or seek power. He just has to keep fighting. Theoden's greatest enemy isn't really Sauron: it's despair. And over the course of the book, he keeps choosing hope and action over despair and hesitation, until finally he can lead his people with courage.

Yes, Theoden’s greatest enemy is despair! Everyone’s greatest enemy is despair. It’s the biggest fucking theme of the series IMO and it makes me crazy how often it gets overlooked.

lord of the rings is a story written by a man whose experience of war was crouching in the bottom of a trench. People like to make a lot of hay about the charge of the light brigade and it’s similarity to the ride of the rohirrim, but no. Tolkien’s experience of war was getting fucking trench fever, not watching cavalry charges. Tolkien’s experience of war was listening to the shells fall around him, knowing that death could come at any moment. He experienced war in a way where the soldiers on the other side of the line were a faceless threat, and the closest and most present enemy was his own fear.

this is the hill I will die on. This is why I hate it when people talk about LotR as a morally cowardly story about fighting mindless orcs that exist to be cannon fodder. No. Lord of the Rings is about seeing the dark coming on the horizon, and fighting yourself. Fighting the fear and despair that rise up inside you. Struggling with your own terror and powerlessness, knowing that you are small, and nothing you do will matter in the face of this massive conflict—  you’re just here, one more meaningless soul to feed into the machine guns. Lord of the Rings is about taking a deep breath, and bracing yourself, and deciding that if nothing you do matters, all that matters is how you do it. The ring can’t possibly be destroyed— we choose to form a fellowship anyway. Helms deep will surely fall by morning— we still choose to fight. The quest can’t possibly succeed— and yet we choose to march into the teeth of mordor to distract the enemy. It’s not hope, exactly? But’s it’s not not hope.

I did at one point have twenty pages written about this. Tolkien was a deeply christian man— he believed in eucatastrophe. Salvation. A better world to come, after suffering, if you bore your suffering well. But he was also a world-class Beowulf scholar with a kinda viking-warrior-type view of the world. And do you know what the vikings believed? (Pls don’t anybody @ me for saying viking, I know it’s a verb and not a culture). The vikings believed that the time of your death was preordained, and that all you had control over was how you met it.

And that is some seriously Rohirric shit!! Like, we’re all mortals doomed to die, Ragnarok is coming, and this whole world is an inevitable grind down into oblivion… but if we’re fighting a long defeat, all the more reason to fight it gloriously!! That’s epic. Eomer approves the hell out of that message.

I’m gonna be a real nerd now, and quote from a poem called the Battle of Maldon.

“Courage shall grow keener, clearer our will,

More valiant our spirits, as our strength grows less.

Here lies our good lord, all leveled in dust

The man all marred. True kinsman will mourn

Who thinks to wend off from battle play now?

Though whitened by winters I will not away,

But lodge by my liege lord that favorite of men;

By my dear one and ring giver intend I to lie.”

That’s a translation from an Old English poem that’s literally a thousand years old, but it always gets me how much it sounds like something Tolkien would write. Theoden and Eowyn are practically leaping out of that poem: We’re all going to die, I choose to meet my end fiercely. We’re all going to die, so I want to die beside my king.

It’s an acceptance of death, and even of failure, but not of defeat. Because— to get back to what I was talking about earlier— Lord of the Rings isn’t actually a story about battlefields. It’s a story about being at war with your own heart. Despair or faith? Hope or defeat? Tolkien wants you to know that even if your city is overrun by orcs, or you’re killed in a meaningless push for another 50 feet of french mud, you can still hold on to your courage with both hands and not cede up your soul to despair-- and that’s the battle Tolkien thinks is really worth writing about.

It’s a battle that every major character in the story fights. Frodo, Sam, Gandalf, Theoden, Denethor, Merry, Pippin, Boromir, Galadriel, Eowyn, Faramir, Eomer, Saruman, Gollum, Aragorn. Some of them hold onto hope through everything. Some of them break utterly. Some of them are defeated, and then with help find their footing again, and make a redeeming last stand.  

But the point that Tolkien hammers home again and again is: Death and failure are natural parts of life, and should be accepted. Despair shouldn’t be.

Tolkien says: hope is hard, actually. Fuck that Game of Thrones grimdark bullshit. Hope is hard fucking work. And even if you don’t have hope? Fight like you do. Because the world needs people working to make it better. Do the best you can with what you have, and whether you can see the mark you’re making on the world or not, the simple fact that you’re trying means the world is a better place.

so i know we're all going wild over TumblrPremiumPlus or whatever the fuck but ive made a new discovery about the r//a///yba//n/s scam (or new to me) and since i spent the time i should have been writing up my thesis proposal doing Tumblr Science instead, i have to at least write it down

so my datemate got an IM from someone asking what 'the sunglasses scam' was. That's in quotes bc the specific phrasing will be significant later.

my datemate replies with a message more or less along these lines:

"The sunglasses thing was about a bot that would hack accounts. Once it had access to an account it would make a post about Ray-Ban sunglasses and if you clicked the link in the post it'd hack you too."

Ey hits enter, but the message won't send. Not unusual, we all know that tumblr IM wil just randomly glitch out when it feels like it. So ey hits refresh, and abruptly finds emself on the log-in page.

"Hi! It's time to change your password!" the log-in page says.

My datemate is naturally suspicious about unexpectedly being asked to alter eir password, but, since ey practises basic cybersecurity and actually uses different passwords for every site, ey figures there won't be too much risk. Ey resets eir password, logs back in, and types out the message to eir friend again.

Same thing happens. Message won't send, ey's booted back out to the log-in page, and told to change eir password again. So ey do.

The third time this happens, ey figures something has to be wrong with the message. I've been watching over eir shoulder for a couple of minutes at this point, so we do a bit of Sciencing to work out what the fuck is going on.

Hypothesis: Tumblr IM is, for some reason, flagging mentions of ray-ban.

Experiment: I send various ray-ban related words and phrases to my datemate via IM. If any of them refuse to send and I get kicked out on refreshing, we've found the culprit

Results: "ray-ban" is fine. "sunglasses" goes through no problem. the precise phrase "ray-ban sunglasses" gets me drop-kicked to the log-in page like i was trying to start a fight in a nightclub (or so i assume. ive never actually been out clubbing)

I do a bit of fucking around on text posts with that phrase to see if that achieves the same effect.

I even tried recreating the original scam post as close as i can get without linking to a malicious website.

not a peep. i stay happily logged in.

so.

tumblrs solution to the ray-ban bots issue

was to blacklist the exact phrase "ray-ban sunglasses"

in the IM feature only

making it impossible

to TELL anyone

who uses the goddamn IM feature

about the goddamn scam