Cosmic Appalachia

instead ask:

is it SINCERE

was it CATHARTIC

was it FUN TO MAKE

is it MADE BY ME

If you find the wrong one, the burn in your heart and the sink in your stomach gets worse

Lindir (Maglor in disguise): wow

Elrond: no actually we'll throw it into a volcano

I also think that most people can relate to a small, helpless creature trying to get from one place to another and there's a FUCKIN WALL in the way.

But to come back to point 1- Citizen Science fills a hole in the soul that wanted to go out on adventures and discover things when we were younger, but the study of it was hard or we didn't have the money or our schools were garbage. But you don't have to have a degree to do things like... press a button or download and use an app, or count or transcribe notes.

Anyways- here's some Citizen Science links if the Fish Doorbell makes you feel happy and you yearn for more ways to help scientists do stuff:

Foldit (folding proteins)

Fathomverse (sea animals)

Project Monarch (butterflies)

Bioblitz, an event where citizens identify as many species in an area within a period of time

Species Watch (animal species)

BOINC’s Compute for Science

Zooniverse is a website that hosts information on many citizen science projects

Label trees in aerial photos

Count cells in fossils and modern leaves

Digitize Atmospheric Data

Count penguins

US-based Citizen Science Database

eBird (bird identification)

Merlin (bird identification by sound)

iNaturalist (nature identification)

MapSwipe (collaboration between several Red Cross organizations and Doctors Without Borders, update vital geospatial data)

like this guy is built up to be a genius in 2384739847 different ways, charismatic as fuck, insanely spiritually powerful, made the magical artifacts the book is named after, he’s got Sexy Protagonist Energy for days, you’re only like a few chapters into the actual story of the Silmarillion, so you’re like “yeah, alright, this guy’s our guy, i can’t wait to see what crazy shit he gets up to in Middle-earth, what kind of character development he has–”

and then he gets to Beleriand, tries to fight Satan, and IMMEDIATELY dies. like. Battle #1. he beefs it. literally spontaneously combusts.

AND YOU STILL HAVE MOST OF THE REST OF THE BOOK LEFT. absolutely ICONIC of tolkien to kill his main character in the first third of the story, and then despite elves being able to return from the dead, he literally never does, not even post-canon. NO ONE ELSE CAN PULL THAT OFF. this is SUCH a power move.

….on a more serious note, Feanor’s decisions and motivations leave a huge impact on every other character, almost every other plot point in the entire story can be traced back to what he did, and killing him off not only increases his narrative importance to those he left behind but also makes it impossible for any character to actually confront him or reconcile with him. he’s a ghost throughout the whole rest of the story, but he’s haunting everyone in myriad ways, through the Oath, through the Silmarils, through his sons, through the repercussions of the First Kinslaying, through the unrest of the Noldor and the rebellion against the Valar, through everything.

I realized something else while scrolling back through this post. It is so, so fascinating to me that Fingolfin gets the death that Fëanor’s character arc seemed to lead to. I think we can agree that an elf isn’t gonna kill a Valar, especially not the most powerful of them all. But Fingolfin did the next best thing—going toe-to-toe with Morgoth for seven blows before crippling him.

And yet it’s Fëanor who swears vengeance, Fëanor who lost his priceless jewels, Fëanor who has the arc building towards a dramatic death in battle against his greatest enemy. But no. Fëanor bites the dust on, like, day three in the most embarrassing and pointless way possible. And Fingolfin is the one to claim the honorable, fulfilling death. I’m not really sure what that thematically says about the brothers’ relationship yet, but I’m so here for it.

I feel like this is something of key importance to the book. Fëanor is the driving force of the Noldor’s return to Middle-earth, he’s the one with the vendetta against Morgoth, but everything of importance done by the Noldor in the actual war against Morgoth is done by the children and grandchildren of Indis, whom Fëanor hates and resents and thinks should never have been born.

So Fëanor dies pointlessly shortly after getting to Middle-earth, and it’s Fingolfin who has the dramatic climactic duel and dies injuring Morgoth. And it’s Finarfin who ultimately is the leader of the Noldor among the armies who defeat Morgoth.

And it continues to the second generation – among the Noldor it’s the grandchildren of Indis, not the sons of Fëanor, who strike the major blows against Morgoth. Fingon has a massive price on his head. (Beren, a Man, the race Fëanor fears and despises, later gets an equally big price on his head from his victories fighting entirely alone.) Morgoth fears Finrod in Nargothronds and especially Turgon in Gondolin, and both are crucial to his defeat – Finrod from his role in the Quest of the Silmaril, Turgon via Eärendil. Fingon saves Maedhros, and thereby probably saves the House of Fëanor given that Maedhros is the only member of that house with a demonstrable ability to negotiate. And with Maedhros accepting that secondary role to the House of Fingolfin, it’s not just the kingship that passes from the House of Fëanor – it’s the protagonist energy. They’re secondary to the story after that, and the one time Maedhros tries to take on the protagonist role – the Nirnaeth Arnoediad – it fails disastrously. From that point, and in stark contrast to Morgoth’s fear of Nargothrond and Gondolin, the Sons of Fëanor are basically Morgoth’s patsies – he regards their oath not as threatening or dangerous, but as convenient and useful, as they take out Doriath and Sirion for him.

Start helping with citizen science projects

What's a citizen science project? Basically, it's crowdsourced science. In this case, crowdsourced climate science, that you can help with!

You don't need qualifications or any training besides the slideshow at the start of a project. There are a lot of things that humans can do way better than machines can, even with only minimal training, that are vital to science - especially digitizing records and building searchable databases

Like labeling trees in aerial photos so that scientists have better datasets to use for restoration.

Or counting cells in fossilized plants to track the impacts of climate change.

Or digitizing old atmospheric data to help scientists track the warming effects of El Niño.

Or counting penguins to help scientists better protect them.

Those are all on one of the most prominent citizen science platforms, called Zooniverse, but there are a ton of others, too.

Oh, and btw, you don't have to worry about messing up, because several people see each image. Studies show that if you pool the opinions of however many regular people (different by field), it matches the accuracy rate of a trained scientist in the field.

--

I spent a lot of time doing this when I was really badly injured and housebound, and it was so good for me to be able to HELP and DO SOMETHING, even when I was in too much pain to leave my bed. So if you are chronically ill/disabled/for whatever reason can't participate or volunteer for things in person, I highly highly recommend.

Next time you wish you could do something - anything - to help

Massive data sets like these take a really long time to work through. Heck, my own tiny data sets take forever for me to work through.

Your help helps IMMENSELY. It allows scientists to focus on the more intense data analysis and paper writing part, and to analyze much more than they otherwise could.

And Zooniverse is coming out with new projects all the time—two new projects showed up this morning in my email!

The past few weeks I have seen an explosion in doomerism and defeatism about Trump. Some people seem to have just decided to call the election for him for reasons that don't even make much sense

(He was almost shot and that always helps! Look at Reagan and Teddy Roosevelt! Reagan was already president and incredibly popular, and the shooting happened 2 months into his first term; Roosevelt was shot when he was campaigning in 1912....in an election he lost)

Trump has never been popular, he has never won the popular vote, and he has never had popular support. For the past 3 years, especially post Roe V. Wade, Democrats have increasingly overperformed especially in special elections. There were so many polls predicting 2022 would be a Red Wave, that turned out to be false due to faulty and biased polling. I'm not saying a Dem loss is impossible, but it is a lot less of a sure thing than the doomsayers are making it out to be

How does Trump win? Apathy. Despair. Low Turn Out. While many of the "Trump is guaranteed to win" posters I'm sure are real people who are justifiably scared, I think we underestimate just how many are people at home and abroad, who want a lower turnout, who want Trump to win.

I used to hear a joke growing up that "If voting did anything, they would make it illegal" Well considering how hard Republicans are trying to discourage voting and making it hard to do, it must do something.

Don't despair. Don't panic. Don't retreat. ACT

So what can you do?

Are you registered to vote? 🗳

You can register to vote here! ☑️

Do you know what/ who will be on your ballot? 📄

Do you know your state voting requirements? 📥

Do you know your polling location? 📍

Can you vote early? 🖊

Can you vote by mail? 📬

Do you need disability services for voting? ♿️

Do you need to know your voter’s rights? 🧑🏽‍⚖️

Do you need a ride to register/ vote?

Spread this far and wide. Tell your friends and your family. Make clear to them what is at stake if Trump wins.

Additionally, here are two volunteer organizations that I help out with

Vote Forward - write letters to encourage turnout

Working Family's Party - an organization working to help progressives win in primaries and general elections. I particularly like working in their text bank program. Want to help in a phone bank but don't like talking on the phone? this is perfect as you send texts to encourage support and voting

you a bitch

There’s another heartbreaking one from the same period in which a woman mourning her son’s murder specifically grieves for “my son who will never bring wedding gifts to his father-in-law’s house, my son who will never bounce a child on his knees.”

And some time between 2200 and 1900 BCE, a refugee from the destroyed city of Isin (now in South-Central Iraq) wrote this:

You can take kids from any culture, any era, change their clothes and their technology and the biggest problems they face will always be the same.

People are people and history can either humanize everyone’s struggles, or make it seem like we’re the ones who have figured it out (laughable) or that we’ve got the Best Culture Ever (uh, no).

Every mom with more than two kids has, at one point, been utterly frazzled and exhausted trying to get dinner made, except for a few handfull of people with full time staff to take care of that for them. Everyone.

huge missing peice of how we

teach kids history.