The Home of Something Other

When Co-workers do things like ask about weekend plans, chat about non-work topics, eat lunch in the same room, they are--subconsciously--reaffirming that they are part of a cooperative (or, minimally, non-antagonistic) social group.

The other primates cement social bonds by grooming each other; we do it by making small talk.

If they solicit your participation in these rituals, and you repeatedly refuse those bids, you are marking yourself out as, at best, an outsider to the group, and thus potentially antagonistic.

This is all happening on the monkey-brain level; they have no idea what they're doing or how they are interpreting your response, so there's no way to clear up the misunderstanding.

To the ape sleeping in your co-worker's DNA, either you are part of the grooming circle, or you are an outsider who, for all it knows, may be coming to steal all the bananas.

at some point, either in response to an invitation, or just in the natural course of conversation, you can add in that you are a "quiet type" who "needs their silence" or what have you. customize to your personal needs. i find it helpful to imagine a well dressed elderly woman describing the sort of peace she needs to manifest.

roughly once a week if you see a group of people chatting, engage with them. keep it pleasant. it can be superficial. word will travel that you are Nice and Quiet and Not The Chatty Type protecting you from group lunches etc. if you have an office with a door that you keep closed a lot, putting up any kind of decor will also send positive signals.

It means my coworker is more likely to feel safe enough to tell me "Can you take over my shift tomorrow?" and I'm more likely to say "yes" even when I don't want to, because I care about his well being and he also takes over shifts for me when he doesn't want to.

It means my coworker is more likely to ask me for help if they experience sexual harassment at work, or if they think they're being underpaid, or if they're actually very lonely and need someone, anyone, to go to their Mom's funeral with them.

i think i found my new favorite artist on twitter

Why is the mountain range square. How did the mountain range form. Why is there one singular volcano in the center. Why does it act like a composite volcano but have magma that acts like it’s from a shield. If it’s hotspot based volcanic activity why is there only one volcano.

my favorite thing is the american great lake snowbelts! so, the 'flow' of weather across north america, in very general terms, blows from the northwest on down south and east to the gulf of mexico.

so the wind is blowing from west to east, and in the winter it's a dryer wind than in the summer because it's colder. but after blowing across a great lake for a hundred miles, the wind is wet again. and that wet turns into snow. so for all of these lakes, the big cities are on the west side, not the east sides, because the east sides absolutely suck to live on.

the sole exception is buffalo, NY, which literally has to be there because, unfortunately, that's where all the important canal stuff between lake ontario and lake erie is happening.

also this always strikes me as cool, check out where cleveland is:

On a Watsonian level, sure.

On a Doylistic level, Mordor looks like that because plate tectonics was a fringe, ludicrous, laughable theory that nobody outside serious geology nerds had ever heard of until scientists proved seafloor spreading in the early 1960s. The first edition of the LotR trilogy was published in 54-55. We literally did not know that plate tectonics was real until almost a decade after the book was published, so obviously, it was not something Tolkien could have been considering as he made his maps.

LotR has recurring themes of the reckless imposition of one's will on the natural world creating ugliness, an order you thought was inherently an improvement that in fact is inferior to what you have displaced. (Typified by reckless tree-felling; a reflection of the despoiling of the English countryside and the world by Progress.)

Moria is the only place in Middle-Earth where mithril is found, right? That's kind of a big deal. So, why? What makes that location so special? Is it just random?

I found a paper that had just been published *that year*, 2011 or 2012 as I was writing it, that studied the locations of precious-metals mines in the Pyrenees, the similarly long skinny mountain chain that divides Spain and France. This paper discovered that where there was a bend in the mountain chain, from one of the continental plates having an awkward corner in it that got subducted under the other plate, that had dug deeper into the mantle and caused precious-metal-bearing ores to flow up to the surface in ways they didn't do anywhere else in the Pyrenees.

There's a conversation in The Fellowship of the Ring where one of the hobbits -- I don't have my copy handy or I'd get the direct quote -- asks why they can see the Misty Mountains ahead of them at one point if they're still heading south from Rivendell, and it's explained that south of Caradhras (which you may recall is the surface mountain under which Moria runs) the mountain chain bends and runs southwest instead of due south for a while.

Tolkien had absolutely no way to know *why* this particular feature of a mountain range was associated with intrusions of rare and unique metal ores, but he had gone backpacking in mountains enough to know How Things Should Look.