The third A was a mistake

Elia week2026 | Day 3 : Quotes

It all goes back and back, Tyrion thought, to our mothers and fathers and theirs before them. We are puppets dancing on the strings of those who came before us, and one day our own children will take up our strings and dance on in our steads. “Well, Prince Rhaegar married Elia of Dorne, not Cersei Lannister of Casterly Rock. So it would seem your mother won that tilt.”

— By the talented @malotte00 for @eliaweek

thank you, marjane satrapi!

i have a file or folder on my pc that i want to share with other people. let's call it gayshit.mp3

unfortunately gayshit.mp3 is 750mb and im not paying for discord nitro so i need another way to send it

i put it into qbittorrent and it makes a torrent file. this is essentially a very small file that points to gayshit.mp3 so other computers can find it. kinda like a treasure map

i send this tiny file to my friend, who loads it into qbittorrent. their computer takes a moment to find mine over the vast expanse of cyberspace and then (as long as my pc is running and the file is still where it should be), it gets copied from my hard drive to theirs

this is the cool part: if somebody else loads that tiny file, they can download it from both of us. if i'm offline but my friend is on, the third person can still get it. this also means that if two people have separate halves of the file, they can download the other half from each other. as long as some combination of people have the pieces between them, they can all have the whole thing.

crucially this does not require a server!!! you can just upload the file to a few people and as long as they keep it, it's still accessible. as long as somebody, somewhere is still connected, it's available forever. the only way it goes away is if everybody disconnects from it.

iukhimov was ukrainian by the way, possibly from odesa though there’s very little info on him i can find in english. his now-dead website exists on the internet archive but text only sadly. someone on the tolkien collector site i’ll link below at one point compiled a bunch of his illustrations on weibo though that link seems to be defunct now unfortunately

The figures look like, say, the illustrations in Old English Genesis A. There might be a little Eastern Orthodox icon style creeping in, or it might just be that that style has a lot in common with early medieval British and Irish manuscript illustration (ca. 600-1100 AD). These are great, and an extremely clever nod to the texts Tolkien was drawing from, and even the literal manuscripts in which he was imagining his work (or at minimum Bilbo’s work, in-universe) to be written:

As Tolkien says, “Further information will also be found in the selection from the Red Book of Westmarch that has already been published, under the title of The Hobbit.” (The Fellowship of the Ring, “Prologue: Concerning Hobbits”). Or, perhaps, in the Red Book of Hergest (Welsh, Llyfr Coch Hergest) — another Red Book of the West (or Wales, that is). Obviously The Hobbit does not actually show up in one of the most important medieval Welsh manuscripts (currently housed at Oxford), but from the very first page of lotr, Tolkien was playing with an incredibly specific manuscript history!