SarahTheCoat

Not Aziraphale and Crowley staring politely at you until you buy your virtual ticket to The Ineffable Con 7:

https://www.theineffablecon.org.uk/tic7/

"I've always thought that if you do two jobs with an actor then it's the second one that will confirm a friendship. I did two films with Rupert Graves- we did Maurice together and then, a few years later, we did Handful of Dust.

"We got on terribly well doing Maurice and then we didn't see each other for a while, but after Handful of Dust, it really cemented a great friendship and he's now one of my closest friends." - James Wilby (2003)

To start off, some facts:

-White wine is made from sweet pulp inside of the grape (minus the seeds).

-Red wine is made from both the skin and the grape (and the seeds and stems…sometimes? Can’t remember).

-Tannin is the substance found in red wines, coffee, dark chocolate. Tannins are responsible for the bitter taste in those foods.

-Tannins are found in the skin of the grape, as well as the seeds and the stems. Therefore, most red wines will have tannins, versus most whites will not have tannins.

-Red wines vary in level of tannins, depending on variety of grape, climate, and fermentation process. Pinot noir tends to be very low tannin. Shiraz/Syrah, choice of poison for our beloved brunette surgeon, is very heavy on the tannins.

-Some white wines (most commonly Chardonnay) are aged in oak barrels instead of metal containers. Oak barrels have tannins, which seeps into the wine during the fermentation process. That’s why Chardonnays tend to be “drier” aka it has tannins.

-White wines like Sauvingnon Blancs are usually fermented in steel barrels (aka no tannins. Aka usually very fruity and light and sweet).

Your ability to taste tannins is genetic.

There is a genetic marker determining whether your taste cells are sensitive to tannins.

Basically two people can drink the exact same wine and have wildly different reactions because: 1. Person A can’t taste tannins, so they taste the actual wine flavor. 2. Person B can taste tannins, and that tends to overpower ALL the other flavors in the wine. Basically all they taste is tannins and none of the wine.

I am super tannin sensitive, so if I drink a wine like Cabernet Sauvignon (very tannin heavy, aka “very dry”, it tastes like bitter ethanol alcohol to me, whereas my best friend can’t taste tannins so the same wine is maybe a little bitter but they can actually taste the grape and different flavors. To her, a wine like Sauv Blanc is too sweet, tastes like sugar water. But to me it tastes good.

So unless it’s the taste of the alcohol or all wines you hate, chances are you might hate the taste of red wine, especially the heavier red wines, because taste the tannin overpowers everything else. And all you taste is bitter bitter ethanol bitter more ethanol. 

More tannin info: -Tannins bind to fat.

-This is why tannin heavy wines are recommended with fatty foods (Shiraz and steak). Whenever you eat food with high fat content, the fat builds up on your tongue. A sip of red wine will bind with the fat on your tongue and clear it away. That’s why the sip of wine between bites of fat heavy foods is considered a palate cleanser.

-By that logic, this is why white wines are recommended with low fat foods, like fish. Salmon is fattier than most fish, which is why Chardonnay (tannin heavy white wine) or Pinot Noir (low tannin red wine) is recommended with salmon.

-People who are sensitive to tannins can drink tannin heavy red wines with fatty food and generally the wine won’t taste gross. The fat on your tongue (from that steak) will bind with the tannin and neutralize the tannin taste. Aka the only time I ever drink Cabernet Sauvignon or Shiraz is with a steak or heavy, creamy pasta. Aka never bc I don’t often eat either.

-The reason dairy helps coffee taste better is because the fat in milk/creams binds with the tannins in coffee and neutralizes the bitter taste. This is why people who can’t taste tannins can generally drink coffee black without milk (sugar is a different story). It’s also why almond milk in coffee is the worst idea (almond milk is already bitter and has no fat).

More wine facts: -90% of the “aromas” of wine are marketing BS

-You know the labels that say like “cherry with a hint of blackberry?” There’s no real way to infuse cherry or blackberry into grape wine without screwing with the fermentation process. It’s all created by the wine marketing industry to sell you win. Sometimes if you smell cherry before you drink the wine, you might taste it in the wine (because majority of flavor comes from smell). Or if you think there is cherry flavor in the wine, your brain can trick your taste buds into tasting it.

-The only true flavors found in real grape wine are grapes (obviously), oak/earthy flavor (the barrels), vanilla (barrels, oak sticks), tannins. (There are a few others but can’t remember. I think maybe cinnamon?).

-People’s perception of wine often affect how good it tastes to them. Social psychology studies show that people will rate the exact same wine differently if they’re told the wines are different in price. (They rated the more expensive wine as tastier).

https://github.com/laylavish/uBlockOrigin-HUGE-AI-Blocklist

Install this blocklist using the instructions on the GitHub page. For Firefox, you will need to install uBlockOrigin for this. Google Chrome no longer allows the uBlockOrigin extension, so I'm assuming you're at least primarily a Firefox user - or about to be (see browser alternatives below).

For Google Chrome or mobile browsers, this will work with uBlacklist. See the GitHub page for full details on compatibility.

Remove AI Widgets:

If you go to your uBlockOrigin Filter lists page, you can select to filter out AI Widgets - this should completely remove the 'AI Mode' widget/button from your Google search page, in addition to the work done by the Huge AI Blocklist.

Using the uBlockOrigin Huge AI Blocklist filter has made my Google searches look like they used to, and gives me genuine search results.

Look at this. It's beautiful. It's informative. It's not a heap of burning trash bloated with fake information made up by a hallucinating chat bot.

We can go even further: return to the old school search results.

Now, the above results are great and should be free of generative AI junk, but some people would rather not see any of the summary widgets or 'people also ask' box at all. Fear not! You can remove all that by using the 'Web' mode in the Google search bar. Click the 'More' drop down menu and select 'Web'.

Huzzah! Incredible. It's like a functional search engine again.

You can make this the default Google search mode in Google Chrome using Method 1 from this page (https://allthings.how/how-to-turn-off-ai-mode-in-google-chrome/). Unfortunately, I don't know if there's a way to do this in Firefox too. This is why for the most part I still use DuckDuckGo (see below) as my default search engine, and only use Google to supplement my searches on the rare occasion I'm just missing something.

Remember, if you clear your cookies, your search engine preferences will reset, including any settings you enabled/disabled to avoid AI. This applies to DuckDuckGo as well; check your settings every time you clear your browser!

Extra filters (optional):

I've also added four filters (their order doesn't matter) to the My Filters page. Full disclosure: I'm not sure they still work, or may only work on Chrome, but I'm keeping them anyway, just in case.

From https://www.reddit.com/r/uBlockOrigin/comments/1i7kg83/comment/m8lllwr/: see which solution in the list works for you, it seems to be different for everybody.

google.*##div[jscontroller]:not(:has(div[jscontroller].YzCcne)):has(.YzCcne)

From https://allthings.how/how-to-turn-off-ai-mode-in-google-chrome/:

www.google.com##.Beswgc

www.google.com##.olrp5b

www.google.com##.hdzaWe

Make sure you hit the apply changes button when you add filters.

Browser alternatives: escaping Google Chrome.

If you haven't jumped ship from Chrome yet, I'd recommend doing so. Sometimes Chrome outperforms Firefox for niche purposes or because a website doesn't bother to fully support non-Chrome browsers, but the days of Chrome being the superior browser are long gone — by about 10 years. If you're trying to escape Chromium browsers, beware that a lot of the popular Chrome alternatives are just Chrome in a different hat.

Firefox has been the most popular non-Chromium browser for years, and for good reason. However, the company running Mozilla Firefox has annoyed their users, me included, by refusing to take an anti- generative-ai stance, and even included AI features in the Mozilla Firefox browser. Most Firefox users specifically use it because they hate Google's enshittification and want a privacy-focused, clean browser that doesn't hog their RAM and CPU for no reason. So, you can imagine that Mozilla's attitude has pissed us all off recently. You can turn off the AI features in Firefox with the built-in settings, but the company has recently steered straight into the burning garbage heap by saying they want to make the browser based on AI.

Waterfox and LibreWolf:

There are really good alternatives based on Firefox (open-source) which are not affiliated with Mozilla (the company), if you don't like how it operates. Waterfox and LibreWolf are even more trimmed down and privacy-focused than Mozilla's Firefox, and don't use AI. Anti-ai statements: Waterfox and LibreWolf.

From this page: https://programming.dev/post/42546774

In short: LibreWolf is for those who want a “locked-down” fortress out of the box, while Waterfox is for those who want a privacy-conscious browser that still feels like a normal, convenient daily driver. Choose LibreWolf if: You want the highest level of privacy without having to manually edit config files, and you don’t mind occasionally “fixing” a broken website or re-logging into accounts. Choose Waterfox if: You want a privacy-respecting browser that supports Firefox Sync, has an Android counterpart, and handles streaming sites/logins without any extra friction (it supports WideWine out of the box, which lets you stream DRM protected content (netflix, hulu, disney, etc). — [email protected]

I've heard good things about both of these browsers and will investigate them further to decide whether to personally switch from Mozilla Firefox.

DuckDuckGo:

I would also recommend installing the DuckDuckGo extension to your browsers and setting it to be your default search engine.

I've had DuckDuckGo installed on my browsers, Chrome or Firefox, for like 10 years now. It is a good search engine, it's unobtrusive, and blocks trackers, cookies, and does not save any data about you. I've also used it as my default mobile browser for years, along with Firefox mobile, which you can add the AI Blocklist to (see again the GitHub page). I haven't tried the DuckDuckGo desktop browser yet, but I imagine it works just fine like the mobile version. I think DuckDuckGo's browser is also Chromium-based, at least indirectly. I use Firefox with the DuckDuckGo extension so I can have a widely-supported, non-Chromium browser, but include all of DuckDuckGo's anti-tracking features.

Note: DuckDuckGo has included AI in its browser product, however you can opt-out of all AI features with the built-in settings and they will not push it on you like Google does. I hope they remove AI features entirely in the future, but for now I am comfortable with the barriers in place to keep AI out of my face. Firefox also has AI features like Chrome does, which you can turn off with the built-in settings.

There's also noai.duckduckgo search, an alternative version of its normal search engine which removes AI-generated images and turns off AI results/assists by default. Even though DuckDuckGo's inclusion of any AI features annoys me, its policy to make these features 100% optional builds trust with this browser/extension/search engine.

You can always use Google search if you need to, but with uBlockOrigin and the AI Blocklist filter added on, at least you shouldn't have AI-altered search results or the AI overview anymore.

Other browsers exist, probably:

There are certainly more non-Chromium alternatives out there, but Firefox, Waterfox, and LibreWolf are the top three recommended to me. That link to alternatives, plus this ComputerCity page are the best lists I could find in a brief search. If you google "non-Chromium browsers" you'll get a lot of mixed results which require a bit of digging to realise they're not really recommending you what you looked for at all.

I've heard about Ecosia over the years, and while I like the idea of a search engine that plants a tree for each query, I don't think that's actually what happens — at least, that's what they used to be reputed to do, but I believe that's an unsustainable business model which has likely changed. In 2026, Ecosia says it uses 100% of its profits for the planet and runs its search engine off clean energy. That's cool! It's still Chromium-based. And it also uses generative AI for chat bots, so I don't trust its principles on environmentalism. I need to do more reading on this to form a stronger opinion about it.

I hope this post has helped at least some of you have a better experience browsing the web and googling your questions.

@esotolkienweek day five | ruins | eregion-that-was

The travellers reached a low ridge crowned with ancient hollytrees whose grey-green trunks seemed to have been built out of the very stone of the hills. Their dark leaves shone and their berries glowed red in the light of the rising sun. Away in the south Frodo could see the dim shapes of lofty mountains that seemed now to stand across the path that the Company was taking. At the left of this high range rose three peaks; the tallest and nearest stood up like a tooth tipped with snow; its great, bare, northern precipice was still largely in the shadow, but where the sunlight slanted upon it, it glowed red. Gandalf stood at Frodo’s side and looked out under his hand. ‘We have done well,’ he said. ‘We have reached the borders of the country that Men call Hollin; many Elves lived here in happier days, when Eregion was its name.’ [...] ‘I think we will rest here, not only today but tonight as well. There is a wholesome air about Hollin. Much evil must befall a country before it wholly forgets the Elves, if once they dwelt there.’ ‘That is true,’ said Legolas. ‘But the Elves of this land were of a race strange to us of the silvan folk, and the trees and the grass do not now remember them. Only I hear the stones lament them: deep they delved us, fair they wrought us, high they builded us; but they are gone. They are gone. They sought the Havens long ago.’

—The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, “The Ring Goes South”

Elven words for rain and mist

These are elven words for and snow and frost including poetic and archaic words

More in the linguistic resources and word of the day (wotd) tags! Let me know if there are any topics you would like to see covered

Lossë in Quenya is both a noun and an adjective meaning snow and snowy.

Loss is the Sindarin word for snow. Both derive from g(los) meaning snow or snow white.

Hrissë in Quenya means fall of snow, derived from sris, another root for snow.

Helca in Quenya means icy or icy cold. It derives from khelek meaning ice

Heleg means ice in Sindarin. The verbal form is hel meaning to freeze

Helcelimbë, literally ice drop, is a Quenya word for icicle.

Aeglos is the Sindarin word for icicle, meaning snow point. The word is most famous for being the name of the spear of Gil Galad and of a flower that grew upon Amon Rhûdh in The Children of Húrin

Nixë means frost but is sometimes used to mean a flake of snow or use. Niqu is the verb meaning to freeze.

Niquis in Quenya means a snowflake or a petal of a white flower.

Niquessë (Q) means frost patterns, translating literally to chill feather

Ith is an early Sindarin word for fine snow. Is is the Quenya cognate. Both derive from ibi meaning light snow ❄️

Helfileg in early Sindarin means frost on panes. It translates literally to freezing ferns.

"The Death of Théodred" by photographer Lillian Liu

First image:

This is our version of the fallen Prince Theodred on his funeral bier, the last of his house. He met his untimely death after holding the mustered forces of Isengard at bay so they could not cross the Fords of Isen into a weakened Rohan. The battle being a phyrric victory in many ways with too high of a cost, his father King Theoden was then left to bury his only son among the wild Simbelmynë flowers (and thus seeing the end of his line with his own eyes). I am absolutely enamoured with @fellandfair ‘s immaculate attention to detail with costuming, making visuals both believable and rooted in realistic inspiration. It is no small effort to put together a shoot ever- and the team included: @posewigs , who made the hair look incredible, @ian__campbell, who lay uncomfortably on a bier with lumpy shields under his back to model for us, @vkngjewelry ‘s beautiful jewelry to give us that extra bit of detail, and many others to be seen in future images.

Second image:

Theodred’s funeral in Tolkien’s universe only serves to highlight the oppressive sense of futility hovering above Rohan during the time of The Lord of the Rings. A land with a weakened king held captive as a puppet, plagued constantly with fearsome raids from the enemy, with the only crown prince and heir falling in a battle intended to wipe out their numbers and morale...the sun would have seemingly set on the people during such a time. And yet, Tolkien shows us that goodness prevails even in times of madness and senseless evil. Here, we have a mourning party depicted- with a mourner central in the scene preparing the body. I feel like she represents the common people of the land. What other characters do you see?

Third image:

Not because his literature is necessarily comedic, though Sam saying "Waste of a good apple" after throwing it at a guy's face in Bree and Aragorn saying "He will never love me I fear; for he bit me and I was not kind to him" (something like that) about Gollum during the Council of Elrond are rather funny, but because of his writing choices.

In real life, Tolkien was born in South Africa, I'd say where I'm from but he was born in Bloemfontein and I was born in the Cape Flats, but he was raised in England and most especially didn't consider himself South African because he despised the Apartheid government and said it's no man's right to judge another's worth on the basis of skin colour and he famously called Hitler a "ruddy little ignoramous" and basically told the Nazis to go fuck themselves. Which is also why Orcs aren't a race, they're a distortion, but he made a point of showing in Return of The King a scene where two Orcs are complaining about Sauron and Saruman and discussing opening a shop in the Shire when this all blows over.

So, he was surprisingly progressive for his time but his literature did fall victim to the whims of invented language where Morgul occasionally became Mughal and the Ringwraiths were referred to as "Black Riders" leading to interesting dialogue like: "Don't worry boys, I'll allow no Black man to pass through here."

And then there's the fact that Tolkien was also friends with people who were openly queer like Mary Renault, Nevill Coghill, and W.H. Auden. Geoffrey Bache Smith was a comrade in WWI and suspected to be in love with Tolkien, but I don't know about that.

That said, it's a little funny for those things to be true and then have to read the word "faggot" every time they make a fire, or describing the elves as a "queer folk."

Tolkien also had some of the strongest female characters in literary fiction at the time like Galadriel, who, while I can't remember the exact words he used, was described far more powerfully than her husband, Celeborn. Sauron once got his ass kicked by Lúthien. And there's that ever favourite anecdote that Tolkien wrote Eowyn's "I am no man" moment against The Witch King of Angmar because he was disappointed with the "No man born of woman" prophecy in MacBeth. But famously, there's no time a conversation is had between women throughout the entirety of The Lord of The Rings.

But even with all these conflictions, Tolkien still makes more time to actually insert ways to troll the audience. Makes sense that he's a troll though, him and Lewis dressed up as polar bears for a party and he once convinced a classroom that leprechauns were real didn't he?

The "we're going in circles" scene in Return of The King (I think) lasted three chapters in the book before Frodo realised this.

After the foreword, he spent a rather long time detailing how Hobbit society works (and usefully coined the term "mathoms" to describe objects you have no use for but don't want to throw away) before the first chapter even starts and you think "Okay, I know everything about Hobbits now against my will" and then later he continues to sprinkle in information about Hobbits like their addiction to mushrooms.

Again in Fellowship of The Ring he spends the foreword complaining about allegory and things of that nature and also details that he doesn't see The Lord of The Rings as a trilogy and you're like "He really wanted to write this as one book?" and then it seems as if out of spite that he springs on you the fact that Fellowship of The Ring is actually two books in one because when you get to Rivendell, it just starts from chapter 1 again.

And Celeborn's name is Teleporno.

Young Arwen