Lellow

It gets so bad he's always being woken up by adverts that offer insomnia cures and better bedding that play when he tries to sleep.

So he buys the ad-free tier, and it's great... for a few months. And then he starts getting adverts from 'premium partners'. So he goes up a level... and the same thing happens.

So he jailbreaks his wallpaper and sends all the ad servers to 0.0.0.0 and voila... he can sleep.

Until this SWAT team blows his door off and drag him off to jail. The Ad companies are suing him for loss of revenue for the products he' notionally have bought if he'd watched their adverts, based on some weird 'The average consumer buys X products with an average value of Y' calculation.

The judge is like 'well I dun wanna annoy the sponsors' so he RICO's this guy's house and possessions and sends him to jail.

... which is a nice relaxed non-volent offender jail for the corporately disenfranchised. But because these people have no money... there's no ads and now he's happy because the only place he's free... is in prison.

Which at the time was a bit much and now it's like: Called it.

Elon's suing companies for not advertising because he's losing revenue. He's also cranking the price of Ad Free Twitter. Disney and Amazon play adverts on their paid service when services used to be free because of the adverts... and now you have to pay to watch the adverts or go up a couple of tiers.

The man

The bear

THE LEGEND!

the make-everything-hades fever has spread to lae'zel

all her boons are for sure big huge damage boosters at the expense of your magic meter

Just last month, three different times, in three different places, someone has driven one of those hilariously hideous pieces of shit into a parking lot or pulled up to the curb, and literally every single person around me rolls their eyes, stifles a laugh, and we all share a moment at that bozo's expense.

easy mode: Gimli (makes a lot of noise himself, very easy to sneak up on)

medium mode: Boromir (challenging enough to be great fun)

hard more: Aragorn (VERY attentive to his surroundings)

Legolas: *sitting around minding his own business*

Frodo: *two inches from his ear* hi Legolas what’s up

Legolas: ANDAGNDOAHGDLKHNKDLFHLKFDANGLKFDAGN????? *backflips to his feet in confusion*

*cue the rest of the fellowship losing their fucking minds*

a picnic of hobbits

Why did Gandalf randomly decide that a plump gentle-hobbit was the right person to be a burglar for an adventuring party? It seems like wizardly eccentricity, until you realize Bilbo’s got a racial bonus to Stealth of like +20. Why does he get the Ring? In text, it’s partly coincidence, but also - which party member do you give your Ring of Invisibility to? The Rogue with a crazy Stealth bonus, of course. Bilbo uses his Stealth, boosted by the Ring, constantly, and the dwarves would have been dead a dozen times over without it. He’s able to get the Ring in the first place because he stealthed out of the middle of a horde of goblins. Then he’s sneaking up inches from trolls, secretly living inside the elves’ freakin palace (with Legolas) for months, rescuing a whole pack of dwarves from under the elves’ noses, regularly pick-pocketing people including elves, sneaking past a dragon, sneaking to deliver the Arkenstone.

Then we follow up into Lord of the Rings. Gandalf’s now bred up a second-generation Rogue. Frodo, Sam, Pippin, and Merry have that same massive racial Stealth bonus, and Frodo also has been raised by an adventurer. He speaks Elvish fluently, he’s friends with dwarves, he studies maps obsessively. Then he inherits Bilbo’s Stealth-boosting magic item - now upgraded to cursed McGuffin. When Gandalf decides it’s time, he collects Frodo and assembles a party. Their goal isn’t to march into Mordor, or to battle the Boss: it’s to sneak through enemy lines, past an entire army (or two).

The humans, elf, dwarf, and wizard angel keep drawing too much attention and getting them attacked (plus admittedly Pippin, the low-WIS darling), so eventually Frodo and Sam ditch them and head off on a pure stealth run. They can’t use the Ring of Invisibility anymore, but fortunately Galadriel gave them another Stealth-boosting magic item, the cloaks. They sneak halfway across Middle-Earth, past armies, through miles and miles of enemy territory, while being hunted by every evil being on the planet, particularly a literal giant All-Seeing Eye. Not to mention the Palantiri, extremely powerful divination items which are being actively used by three different groups of enemies/competitors.

The other main canonical Hobbit power is that they’re “very hardy folk”, meaning they have incredibly high resistance to various things from poison to mental influence. So they can survive the literally poisonous air and water of Mordor, which was designed to kill every species but orcs. And they can survive close contact with the Ring for decades or centuries, not only physically but also maintaining some degree of mental independence, when any other race would succumb in minutes to hours. (Note the most “powerful” characters - Elrond, Galadriel, the literal angel Gandalf - refuse to even touch the Ring, as do the most morally sound, Aragorn and Faramir.)

Why did Gandalf choose a minor member of the country gentry, the size of a toddler, with no combat training, to save Middle-Earth? Because absolutely no other creature on the planet could have done the task. Frodo was all but created as a weapon against Sauron. He, and he alone (with Sam), was capable of saving Middle-Earth.

Canonically, The Ring’s whole thing is that it enhances the pre-existing abilities of whomever wears it, in addition to driving them insane. This is why it would be so devastating for Gandalf, or Galadriel, etc to get their hands on it. They’re already super powerful, the buff would make them unstoppable.

And the stealth thing is established really early on in the Hobbit as the thing hobbits were amazing at. It would kick ass as a detail for The Ring to only turn Hobbits invisible. Among other points, it enhances the plot-point of Gandalf not being able to recognize the thing and then after his suspicions were raised taking so much time studying ring-lore before he could. If The Ring only turned Hobbits invisible, then Gandalf literally has nothing to go off of for identifying the damn thing until he’s gotten his PHD in Ring-ology. Which is canonically what it took for him to figure it out.

This is still plausible without the alteration to The Ring’s exact properties, but I feel that the narrative is a bit stronger with it.

Amusingly, as far as I can tell its also canon-compliant.

What the fuck does that mean, didn’t I already say that Isildur is canonically turned invisible by The Ring? Ah, but you misunderstand the nature of Tolkien’s canon. The Hobbit exists within the fiction of The Hobbit. It is written by Bilbo, with Tolkien himself merely translating it from Westron to modern English. The Lord of The Rings is compiled by Frodo, the Silmarillion is a Noldor history book.

We know that The Ring turned Isildur invisible because of how he died; his party was ambushed on the road by orcs. Isildur donned The Ring and leapt into the river to escape. But The Ring betrayed him, enlarging itself on his finger and falling off, thus allowing the orcs to see him and fill him with arrows.

Except.

That’s the translation of what happened, and we don’t know how reliable the original source was in any case. Recall that ordinary humans are already remarkably resistant to death by injuries that would fell other creatures, and Isidur was a full-blooded Numenorean besides. It is entirely plausible that The Rings enhancement of these properties would make Isildur very difficult to kill indeed. Maybe he was already full of arrows when he went into the River, but his wounds only became fatal retroactively, with the loss of The Ring.

Perhaps the “original text” Watsonian-Tolkien was translating more simply indicated that Isildur went into the river, was betrayed by The Ring, and this caused his immediate death-by-arrows. Watsonian-Tolkien could, in this case, be forgiven for assuming that it was a matter of loosing the invisibility which The Ring emparts to so many Hobbits in the texts Watsonian-Tolkien has read which led to Isildur’s death.

Like the one that stuck with me was this one:

"when a person dies and no one will miss them, the mourning is assigned to a random human. This is why sometimes you just feel sad."

Putting my own spin on the one and only Kurt ‘Nightcrawler’ Wagner because I’m EXCITED for X-Men ‘97, and with Gambit now happily married, someone else needs to have the frauleins dropping their knickers like they’re live grenades.

Very strong Errol Flynn influence, X-Men outfits are really best when they accentuate the character instead of ‘fitting with a team’ (there was a period where they all had these slick black and gold uniforms but where’s the fun if EVERYONE looked like that? More so the X-Men who revel in differences?) so there was really no reason the Fuzzy One couldn’t own the full longcoat and brocade shoulders!