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Other companies, as far as I’m aware, don’t even advertise having a “physical copy,” let alone charge for it

Tolkien wrote The Hobbit like waaaay before he even dreamed up the idea for Lord of the Rings, so when he DID dream up LotR, he had a whole bunch of stuff that didn’t make sense. Like plotholes galore

Like for example in the first version Gollum was a pretty nice dude who lost the riddle contest graciously and gave Bilbo the ring as a legit present and was very helpful and it was super nice and polite and absolutely nobody tried to eat anyone because this is a story for kids and that’s very rude

But that doesn’t work with LotR, so Tolkien went back and re-released an updated version of The Hobbit with all the lore changes and stuff to fix everything that didn’t work

This is the version we know and love today

BUT rather than pretend the early version never existed, Tolkien went and worked the retcon into the lore

If you pay attention in Fellowship, there’s a bit where Gandalf is telling Frodo about the ring and he mentions how Bilbo wasn’t entirely honest about the manner in which it was found

To us modern readers, this doesn’t make a ton of sense, so mostly we just breeze by it–but actually that line is referencing the first version of The Hobbit

The pre-retcon version of the Hobbit is canonically Bilbo’s original book. The original version with Nice Gollum is canonically a lie Bilbo told to legitimize his claim to the ring and absolve him of the guilt he feels for his rather shady behavior

Then the post-retcon version is an in-universe edited edition someone went and released later to straighten out Bilbo’s lies

So it’s 100% plausible that the in-universe editor who fixed up Bilbo’s Red Book and translated it from whatever language Hobbits speak was a human who knew about Christmas Trees and tossed the detail in to make human readers feel more at home, because that’s the kind of thing that sometimes happens when you have a translator editor person dressing up a story for an audience that doesn’t know the exact cultural context in which the original story was written

Tolkien was a medieval scholar and medieval stories are rife with that sort of thing, so like… yeah

No that’s right! The basic point still stands and is neat but a lot of Rohirric names are translated as Old English, like Theodred and Eorl and so on. Another interesting thing is that he sometimes modernized them to modern English because, apparently, those names were intelligible to Westron speakers, either because Gondorians knew them or because the Hobbits recognized them from their dialects (they once lived near the Rohirrim and borrowed a bunch of words, including their name for themselves). Here’s a good link about it from Tolkien Gateway, it’s SUPER cool. 

Sarah: *I’m* the Goblin Queen, bitches - you go wave your fans somewhere else.

Like…

-He kept stumbling on the stairs in the ballroom scene. Jennifer keeps laughing at him because, oh my fuck, you’re David Bowie, aged 40something, Rock God Supreme, stupidly beautiful, actually trained in all this shit….and my adolescent ass remembers these stairs are here, but you don’t?!?!???????/

- The script originally called for Jareth and Sarah to kiss, but David Bowie straight up refused because Jennifer Connely was a minor and he was a grown-ass adult.

- Henson wanted a famous musician to play the Goblin King and had debated casting Michael Jackson, until David Bowie came over and…hopped up onto the table, and, with a wicked gleam in his eye, pulled a bone flute out of his pocket, hopped up onto the table, and, crouching thereon, played it at him and Henson was like “that is the Goblin King right there”

- Jennifer was apparently an absolute dream to work with and they didn’t realise how dangerous some of the stunts she acted were until they saw an actual teenager, say, going down the shaft of hands

- David Bowie was TERRIFIED OF HEIGHTS.  During the Diamond Dogs tour in the 1970s, he got stuck on an elevating chair on stage, and later, in the 80s, during Glass Spider, he had an elevated prop fucking PRECIPITATELY DESCEND under him.  Nonetheless, he did a lot of the Escher Room stuff himself - not all of it, some of it is a stunt guy, but damn, for a dude with acrophobia, doing ANY of it is impressive.

(She went by her first, rather than middle, name back then)

Do you really believe execs care about what you’re saying? All that they will see is that people hate shows with reps, and that shows with reps get the most hate and more so than shows that don’t even try, so the message to them is that we shouldn’t try since people will eventually turn on them. All you’re doing is making creators see what these shows go through and go you know what, it’s not worth it. Because the level of outright malice is vicious and horrifying. 

Queen guitarist Brian May, speaking with Terry Gross in 2010 

TERRY GROSS: Have you heard the Muppets version of “Bohemian Rhapsody”?

BRIAN MAY: Yes, of course, of course!

GROSS: It’s really fun. Can I play that for our listeners?

MAY: Yeah, you can. Well, we’d had to have heard it because it’s us on the record. You know, they asked us if they could do it. And they said, “Look; we can sing this, and we can perform it. But we can’t really play it. So can we use your actual track?” So…

GROSS: Oh, I see. I see.

When talking about the departed, Jews say “may their memory be a blessing.”

It is worth noting that many of the policies it was criticizing, however (such as book-burning), were also utilized by corrupt communist governments like the Soviet Union. So it would be fair to say that what it was calling out was fascism and fascist elements introduced by corruption.

From this perspective, three defining features of ADHD emerge that explain every aspect of the condition:

1. an interest-based nervous system

2. emotional hyperarousal

3. rejection sensitivity”

10 tricks you didn’t know you could do with your food.

We had a long discussion about what in the twelve hells this video even is. A surreal, dadaist parody so obscure that our brains aren’t operating on enough levels to comprehend it? The Instagram lifehack equivalent of those terrifying procedurally-generated animated Youtube videos that farm ad revenue by playing millions of times to babies whose parents left the iPad on autoplay? A coded message designed to activate the combat programming of brainwashed cyborg sleeper agents? A post that slipped through a wormhole from an alternate dimension where the laws of reality are different? An emanation of a vast and alien chaos god?

I cannot bring myself to confront the claims in this video in the order they are put forth without losing my will to live after the first one, so I will start with the least crazy and work my way up.

Bananas to ripen things: More or less true. You’ll sometimes see advice to cooks to store underripe fruit in a paper bag with one piece of overripe (but not rotten) fruit to ripen it more quickly. Misrepresentations: It will probably take longer than overnight to ripen something as green as some of those tomatoes, and it doesn’t have to be a banana.

Coca-cola and milk: The coke is more acidic than the milk and curdles it, resulting in solid globs of milk protein which settle out. The brown dye in the coke sticks to the milk protein globs, leaving the excess liquid more or less clear. Misrepresentations: The video has been enormously sped up, which the editing does not make clear; the reaction takes hours.

Ketchup to clean metal: To my mild surprise, this is actually a thing (though you could just make a paste out of salt, flour, and vinegar and scrub with that and not get ketchup stains on everything)… Misrepresentations: …for cleaning copper and bronze. Which the jug shown in the video is not. The acid in the ketchup might take some of the tarnish off, say, aluminum, but at that point you might as well just use vinegar.

Sparkling water omelet: Omelet souffles are a thing. Misrepresentations: You… literally do not need the sparkling water… you can just beat the eggs until they’re fluffy…

“Warm water clears wax from fruits!”: This is a mysterious and arcane procedure called “washing.” Misrepresentations: I don’t know what the hell they even did to the video on this sequence but as a person who has washed many apples in warm water, it does not look like that and the thin layer of edible wax applied to make them look good in the grocery store does not come off that easily.

Sprite to clean earrings: Again, this will take tarnish off some metals just due to the acid, but… Misrepresentations: DO YOU WANT GROSS STICKY EARRINGS AND EAR INFECTIONS? JUST USE VINEGAR WATER. Also, “dirt” is not a kind of molecule. (Incidentally, if the earrings are silver, there is a vastly better method that actually reverses the tarnish instead of removing it.)

Insta-freeze bottle: This is a real thing… Misrepresentation: …which absolutely will not happen if you follow their instructions, because a) they neglect to mention an important caveat (the water needs to be purified/distilled) and b) 5 minutes is not long enough for a water bottle to supercool. If you google any of the myriad videos and articles of people doing this trick, you’ll see numbers like “3 hours in the freezer” or “40 minutes in a salted ice bath.”

There is video of the trick working. Either that footage was taken from someone else, or they knew how to do it, did it, and then deliberately lied about the time for no apparent reason.

Putting a broken plate in milk for two days magically fixes it: To my immense surprise, they didn’t make this one up; the idea is that the milk protein casein can form into a plastic at high temperatures and bind to the ceramic. Googling it turned up some hobbyist potters commenting that they’d used it to salvage things that had cracked slightly in the kiln. Misrepresentations: Once again, they’ve misrepresented the method: everything I saw talking about how to do it said to boil the milk and then soak for an hour, not leave it out for two days like an offering to the pixies. And most of what I saw reported about it also said it only really works on hairline cracks, not full breaks, and doesn’t hold up long-term because the real structural damage isn’t repaired. And may leave a faint and persistent odor of boiled milk.

Just use superglue.

“Reveal the genetic memory of the honeycomb”:

This is the kind of gibberish predicated on so many nonsensical assumptions that unpacking it would be more trouble than it’s worth. Plus, well, I can barely see anything with the low video quality, but what I can see of the vague blur doesn’t look much like a honeycomb in the first place. Suffice to say:

“Honey looks like a honeycomb” isn’t even in the ballpark of what’s generally meant by “genetic memory,”

what’s generally meant by “genetic memory” is also complete hooey, and

fluid dynamics is weird and swirling a thick, viscous, water-soluble liquid with a layer of water on top is going to do weird things.

But at least that I could potentially attribute to ignorance rather than deliberate intent to deceive, unlike…

Hot coals and peanut butter

This is the reason it’s taken me this long to post this. Every time I think about it my soul starts to leave my body. It’s such a mind-boggling level of bullshit that every time I’ve tried to put words around an explanation I’m quickly reduced to staring at the screen and mouthing “No” to myself in a voice of quiet despair, because I can’t even figure out where to start.

Well, okay, I guess I might as well start by saying I think their… let’s say inspiration on this was articles about scientists who made diamonds out of peanut butter and carbon dioxide. …With a press that’s designed to recreate the conditions of the earth’s mantle, and which is prone to exploding. So, you know, not something you can do in your kitchen. Unless you have one hell of a kitchen.

You can see the direct links to this in the nonsensical claim that this “works” because peanut butter contains carbon dioxide. (It doesn’t, particularly. It’s crushed peanuts mixed with oil. You know what would have a lot of carbon dioxide? The fire you pulled that glowing lump of charcoal out of.) It also mentions “pressure” when no particular pressure is involved, presumably because we’ve all heard about turning coal into diamond under heat and pressure.

Chemically speaking, there’s very little to make that crystal out of except carbon, unless you want to posit a mass migration of all the sugar molecules in the peanut butter to the center of the coal. And “carbon crystal” = “diamond,” and do you think if it was that easy to make diamonds they’d be that expensive?

I will guarantee you that crystal is a lump of quartz they covered in black crud and then peanut butter to pretend it was the charcoal.

But, of course, all of that is irrelevant, because by reblogging this at all, even to performatively despair that the internet does not seem to have come all that far since the days of Infinite Chocolate, I’m playing into their hands. Lifehack clickbait has done this forever- they deliberately seed in wrong or awful advice because people will share that to say how stupid/wrong it is. They led with complete insanity to get attention, and I gave them eyeballs on the video watching this, and I’ll be giving them more from writing this.

Maybe I’ll stick to the chaos god theory. It’s less depressing.

So to me anything that is funny on the internet is, and always will be, cutting-edge and hilarious.  If it’s funny the first time, it’s funny the eleven thousandth time.  No exceptions.

I accumulate memes. Social media sites form actual strata in my soul, revealing my geological age in layers: Geocities, Myspace, Livejournal, Tumblr.  Memes encrust me, like jewels, just layer on layer of reaction gifs and shitposts, some of which I barely understand, but I refuse to let go of.  I cling to them, they are ever-relevant, undying.

You callow youths, who think in your innocence that that memes come and go, you are tepid fools who still smell of milk.

I am where memes go to die. I am where memes go to live eternal. Someday, if you are lucky, you will join me.  Bring your breadsticks meme, your Spiders Georg, your Bode, your big mood, your Supernatural gifs, your oh worm.  Come with me and rejoice in pointless in-jokes and long-forgotten references.  Embrace your encyclopedic knowledge of comedy sites ca 2006 and come share the knowledge with us. Come with me and lik the bred.  

Wow! I can’t believe I’ve got 10,000 followers! ( @kiss-my-asymptote was number 10,000!) To celebrate, we’ll be giving away 5 prizes!  (Unfortunately, law says this will only work for US followers.) Here’s what we’re giving away!

Bronze Prize: (2) A set of dice will be sent to you!

Silver Prize: (2) You get one bath bomb from @dnd-apothecary, and a set of dice! 

Gold Prize: (1) The big haul! You get 1 D&D book of your choice, a large set of dice, a bath bomb, and a candle from @dnd-apothecary! 

1. Only reblogs will count as entries, and only one entry per day.

2. Must be following this blog.

3. You’ll be contacted by PM once the giveaway ends if you won.

4. Entries will be accepted until October 31st, 2018.