Eien Moon

Anyone with a name that starts with a “Z”, ends with an “i”, and isn’t some kind of Italian pasta, IS SERIOUS

Sean: .....yes. absolutely

Elijah: 100 percent.

The Shire is excellent farming country, with consistently good weather, and only one tough winter in living memory; hobbits like to produce large families; they’re resistant to disease, rarely violent, and encounter few dangers. It is usual for hobbits to produce many children, so that (for example) Bilbo and Frodo are unusual in both being only children, with no siblings, and not having children of their own. All of this should point to a population that increases every generation if not doubling outright. Young people (and their ideologies!) should rapidly outnumber the old with an ever-increasing effect and impact on society. However, the Shire has a surprisingly stable history; it never seems to increase or decrease greatly in population, and the bell curve of age seems… demographically balanced? There certainly isn’t a conflict from rising young bloods challenging the middle-aged reactionaries; there’s no unemployment; there are no housing crises or waves of emigration, or even a tendency for young people leaving home to marry. Meanwhile, not only does the Shire not suffer from internal pressures, but it remains obscure and hardly noticed in global politics.

What makes sense here is that adult hobbits form a loose group. Four parents in a polycule, between them all, may produce four children. All four parents claim to have four children. An outsider would assume this meant the adults had eight children.

Hobbits therefore are not especially fertile or fecund. They simply have large families. Much of their interest in genealogy is due to the complex relationships of blood-kin, hearth-kin, love-kin and pledge-kin, who must all be carefully tracked and measured - not just because you need to make sure that you don’t climb into bed with an un-permitted degree of blood-kin, but to track family alliances and carefully quantify the precise level of thoughtfulness to put into the proper present to gift your father’s lover’s lover (too much implies a degree of intimacy that might upset the polycule.)

Thus, while a hobbit matron may tell a startled dwarf that she has seven sons, she might only have borne five of them herself, and have one hearth-son by her wife, and a pledge-son of her first husband’s. There are between three and four fathers involved at various stages of production, from conception to pledge-duty, but there is debate about the precise number of fathers, as one child was festival-conceived and therefore provisionally pledged to the Brandybucks until more distinctive paternal traits should materialise. It’s expected that four of the sons will be uninterested in women, and their contribution to family life will be in raising hearth-children and pledge-duty. However, this level of detail is normally negotiated later in conversation, as a mutual overture of friendship. So she’s just clear and simple: yes, certainly, she has seven sons. Yes, they’re all hers. Yes, that’s fairly normal - yes, hobbits like big families. How big? That’s really hard to say! Well, about thirteen hobbits live in her house… er, she has forty-three nieces and nephews. Yes! She has nine siblings, that’s correct, but some of them are still babies themselves..

In this way, a bewildered dwarf might assume that hobbits are absurdly fertile, producing an average of seven children per couple, at an absurd pace.

When in fact, with about half of hobbits never bearing biological children, the population of hobbits is pretty much always the same.

Tl:dr, hobbit population works perfectly well, both internally and in the perceptions of outsiders, if the majority of the Shire is gay, they’re all polyamorous, and they all firmly claim to be parents of high numbers of children. Of course Frodo fathered Sam’s kids - he named them! They were pledge-kin but not hearth-kin, as Frodo needed a lot of quiet and stability in the home.

In short, all of the hobbits enjoyed achieving even larger families on their adventures, legally and without argument or debate. It’s free real estate. If nobody else is going to sibling these losers, we will. (The condensation of so many entanglements at once also legally made Pippin his own father-in-law.)

Gandalf never explained.

Inheritance follows parent-child pledge as the primary consideration, with matrilineal descent as the secondary. Pippin would have been bewildered to gradually understand that Denethor held his two sons in such odd and different standing :-/ hobbits don’t recognise kingship so it would’ve been very upsetting and disappointing to Pippin to understand how Denethor stood in position of sworn-father to a whole city of people without even being slightly fair to his younger hearth-son. Aragorn is demonstrably much better dad-material and therefore had Pippin’s vote. Pippin, by virtue of being an excellent father-in-law to a spectacularly promising young son-in-law, also considered himself a better candidate for king of Gondor than Denethor, by outranking him in Dad Competence - but was too busy by the time he realized this to point this out .

So, companies are tracking you no matter what you do, but this specifically is something I care about deeply.

Essentially, when you share a link, sometimes it has extra data that tracks where it comes from and goes.

Opening Spotify, clicking the first item, and using the share button, I get something like open.spotify.com/track/4P0f1HTaA2UwtLJGryNgJZ?si=DBvbfihOSweU1KHj9Mib8w

That ?si=...........…. is the tracker. It tells Spotify who clicks on the link and ties it to you, meaning Spotify knows who your friends are even if you never follow them.

Similarly, if on Amazon or EBay in the browser, I get something like www.ebay.com/itm/146493392451?_skw=lenovo&itmmeta=............&hash=item................&itmprp=enc..............

And, similarly, everything after the question mark is tracking you. I had to blank it out because it was so long!

There is an exception for a few things (I.E. the v=..... on YouTube, but not the si=..... on YouTube)

The general rule is delete everything after the ? and if it breaks, add something back.

When Life Gives You Corpses is a brilliant YA about a cursed praying mantis who falls for a young witch. Yield Under Great Persuasion is a raunchy, but surprisingly sweet story about two men repairing their relationship. Fabulous Bodies is a horror story about a queer rockstar rising from the dead.

This is Where the Future Bleeds is a fantasy set in a vividly imagined land, where two women (who happen to kiss) are the key to healing the broken sky. You're No Better is a story about a teen struggling in the shadow of his murderous parent. Oil on Canvas is about a woman who finds disturbing paintings in the home of her dead mother.

(Some) Queer Presses:

Lurid Editions are "a publishing project committed to intentional and conscientious acts of archival repair". They are "attentive to how marginalised histories are forgotten and remembered, [and] hungry to rediscover overlooked queer books". They've just received funding from Arts Council England to engage queer readers in a project to contribute to the archive!

Cipher Press "We’re really keen on the idea that queer and minority stories are for everybody, and we want to make our books – and the stories they tell - accessible to all" (what an amazing mission statement!)

Anamot Press "Anamot [Անամոթ] means shameless in Armenian. ⁣⁣Anamot Press publishes poetry and prose on intersecting experiences of gender, sexuality, race, migration, class, belonging and loss - with no shame."

(Some) Queer Bookshops

Queer Lit Oh man, I remember when this was just a tiny little shop, and now they're the biggest LGBT+ bookshop in Europe! They do amazing work in donating books about being trans to schools and parliament! They have a pay-it-forward board that will make you sob with its notes of love and support. (You can tell I wish I still lived nearby)

Lighthouse For Scottish friends - "a queer-owned and woman led independent community bookshop. We are an unapologetically activist, intersectional, feminist, antiracist, lgbtq+ community space"

Gay's The Word The OG Queer bookshop in the UK. One day I will make my pilgrimage!!

Hi there! I always end up rereading the same stories and I'd like to discover new ones 😊

Can anyone recommend fics in which either Miranda or Andy take care of one another because one of them ends up in a hospital or one of them is sick? I'm letting some of my fav fics below for reference:

By Heart by chilly_flame

Collide by emeraldorchids

Falling at her door by JasFiction

Isolation impossible by JasFiction

I don't want any f/m or other triggering stuff in them, just a fluff and funny story ^^

Thanks in advance!

"What is this book?????" i hear you ask.

It is this book by @lincodega!!! PASHA THE STORM!!!!!! The year's absolute best pirate fantasy novel which will blow your tits clean off. I got to read an advance copy and i am here to tell you that it Slaps it Slaps it fully fully Slaps.

It comes out on June 30th, so you should go read it right now and tell your friends who liked Black Sails, Our Flag Means Death, or Running Close to the Wind (For fans of the latter: Imagine if Avra Helvaci was an old woman. This is the kind of horny chaos gremlin energy we're talking about. Everyone around Pasha is like "Pasha no" and Pasha is like "PASHA YES!!!!!!!!")

SUMMARY: An exiled pirate queen hunts a killer whale on the high seas, while caught between a power-hungry empress and a revolutionary conspiring to end her reign . . . Pasha the Northern Storm was once the most infamous Meridian pirate who ever sailed the sister oceans. Now, a decade into her exile, Pasha’s afterlife is being held hostage by Atle, an absurdly attractive noble who knows far too much about pirate magic—but not enough about sailing to realize how dangerous Pasha really is. Minister Atle Itaavar is duty-bound to serve the Kingdom of Garda, but as Queen Thivaldís gathers support for her ambitions of empire, Atle turns to treason to stop her. In order to destroy the Queen’s new necromantic navy, Atle plans to steal the Queen’s flagship, kidnap a washed-up pirate to sail it, and track down a legendary killer whale to bring it down.  But the hunt for the great undying whale drags Pasha, Atle, and the crew of the Dog into a cosmic reckoning as they face threats from ghosts and gods alike—and the Queen of Garda is close behind.

“What do you mean?” he asked. “But there’s a full stop as part of the question mark!”

She nodded gravely. “I know!” she said. “A lot of people find this confusing. But the speech tag belongs to the line of dialogue, it’s still part of the sentence, so it’s wrong to capitalise it.”

-Hungerstone by Kat Dunn

"I'm pretty sure that fella ain't here legally."

"Well, that ain't your business Chip, it's his."

They hate being preached to. If you pull out words like 'gender wage gap' they'll tell you you're brainwashed by the far left media.

"He's one of them transgenders."

Shut down the conversation without reacting.

"His dick, not mine" will get you much further to shutting that guy down than "well it's really inappropriate to call someone a slur while I'm the job site".

A place to rest ❤️