love doesn't just sit there, like a stone

An ex-libris, also called bookplate, is a kind of printed stamp at the beginning or end of a book that says who owns it (think of the stamp you surely have seen in the books owned by a library). Though ex-libris have been used since ancient times, their "golden age" in Catalonia was during the Modernist movement (the Catalan equivalent of Art Nouveau), where many bookworm people commissioned artists to have a beautiful personal ex-libris that they could use to stamp all their collection.

The text in the 1st one, written in the Catalan language, says "no matter how much you know, there's always much more that you don't know" (per molt que sapies es molt mes lo que ignores).

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 .

Hobbits, in fact, absolutely do recognize kingship, even though they haven't had contact with any kings in generations. It's in the text that they say of people who behave badly that "he didn't know the king", and they immediately accepted Aragorn as king (admittedly, partially because he immediately acknowledged the Shire as self-governing and said that Men could not enter it without the permission of the hobbits).

So some fanartist drew a “sexy” (read: booby) version of a (cartoon) character who is traditionally very non-sexualised. Fans of the character got mad about it because it’s kind of groundbreaking how that character is written and portrayed and this art totally ignores the entire point of the character. They demanded the art be deleted. In response to that other people said, well what the fanartist did may be distateful but they have every right to draw what they’re into. The two sides fight for days and each starts a harassment campaign and even report their “opponents’” accounts.

So far so typical. But things eventually come to a head and they decide that this will be settled by votes - not through a poll. Through donations to a children’s education charity via each side’s portal. Whoever can get the highest amount of donation wins.

Pointing at things and explaining what they are and how the ship works, lots of awed and appreciative noises are made.

Until one of the visiting Eridians points out a specific item. “And that?”

It’s a strange, circular thing, a xenonite disk mounted upright on some sort of pivot so it can spin freely, but around the edges it has… spokes? Pegs? Sticking out of it, that hit against a stiff flap that would slow down the spinning.

It is also separated into sections decorated with crude etchings of a human and an Eridian.

“Ah,” Grace says.

“That,” Rocky says.

“That’s. Um.” Grace seems somewhat embarrassed. “That’s the sacrifice wheel.”

How to Start by rthwrms

for the times when you really truly want to do something, but find resistance or that starting feels impossible

most helpful action to get into a task is: look at it options include: review what you've already done open the tab on screen blur your eyes at first if that helps fullscreen the image browse or skim relevant texts let your gaze move around how it will JUST...LOOK!!!

Your brain has resistance towards starting the particular project in the way that you've previously conceived of it. Instead of fighting that resistance, try to change your approach to starting your work. Ie, start with colored pencils on a piece you were doing in gouache, include a new stitch in a crochet piece, Step one: identify the process Step two: identify places where something new can be included Step three: brainstorm new options to fill these spots Step four: select one or more options and try your piece from this new angle

encourage yourself by asking questions start with: "What am I actually trying to do right now?" then try: "What would this look like if it were more fun?" "How would I do it if anything was possible?"

divide into discrete tasks make the closest or shiniest one literally as small & specific as freaking possible

image text: I BELIEVE IN YOU screenshot text: The world is full of magic things, patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper. W.B. Yeats (via billowy)

there is a window now there is a door