#fostertheory

We have to refrigerate eggs in the US. While I know intellectually that they can be stored on the counter elsewhere, it still draws me up short to be reminded of it.

What?? That's ridiculous. I thought Unravel was good, and that's true of your writing generally. I'm sorry that happened to you.

It wasn’t my writing as such. I can string together sentences well enough, but I’m lacking in the moral department. It was too much to have Dís breaking her marital vows, apparently. Never mind that the Dwarves probably don’t have the Till Death Do Us Part because usually they don’t need it, but they do need to put the property details on paper, as the mercantile beings they are. I got scolded for sullying Tolkien’s memory and I know not what. The fact that Tolkien was an unapologetic racist - remember that he was born in South Africa, or Oranjefristaten, when it was a Boer state. His parents weren’t there by coincident, and I think it’s quite clear that the opinions of the Brits and Boer in the region rubbed off on him, through his family. The Orcs are so obviously the masses of what white Brits at the time (and many still today) think were by evil forces easily led black savages - seemed to have flown over their heads completely. 

Dís would NEVER. Well, no, if we’re to believe the pseudo-science of Tolkien’s world, she wouldn’t have, if she had actually cared for the Dwarf in the correct way. She didn’t, which is why it could happen in the first place. It was the whole point of the story, that her not falling in love with a Dwarf but still marrying, and then falling in love with an Elf, was what would set big things in motion. World changing things. It’s not something I decided in a whim. It’s what the story is built on, that Kíli isn’t 100% Dwarf. It was supposed to come out in a big way later on, because Dwarven society has this fundamental flaw, that mixed Dwarves aren’t accepted in the communities. So what happens when one in the royal line is mixed? And there’s another really important reason why this matters so much, but I can’t go into that because that would be a huge spoiler for what was supposed to come. I also wanted Kíli to be completely unaware that anything could be amiss, which was the reason for her still being married to Fíli’s father when it happened. If she hadn’t, Kíli would have known something, if not the whole truth. Family would have know, not just suspected, as in Dwalin’s case. The point was that he and almost everyone around him didn’t suspect a thing. It was meant to be a reveal that shook the foundations of Dwarven society.

Deciding that Dís had an extramarital affair is where I went wrong, though, and became A Very Bad Person whose writing should be destroyed. And here I thought I was writing about racism and what that leads to for these individuals and a society at large. But no. All the focus was on Dís having an affair. And, I suspect, that she took the initiative to have this love affair. I’m never going to write ambiguous sex where the heroine says no but means yes. This is the 21st century. We should be done with Victorian prudery.

Yeah, I felt the same way about it overall. I enjoyed it; it was fun. It wasn't moving in the same way as WW was. But that doesn't make it a failure in my mind.

^^^^

I'm glad it's over.

Thanks. Sadly, I did discover it’s not 100% over...just 99.999999% over. Maybe. Hopefully. It’s basically a bug which is only evident in a production environment and which is stubbornly difficult to quantify in said environment.

You know how they say as you cross over the event horizon it takes you forever to actually reach the black hole, so you may never, in your own perception - if you could retain it under such conditions - reach it?

You totally should try to command Alexa. Pick songs that convey a message, eg, the Black Eyed Peas' "Shut Up". Either than or a genre that would, er, expand their horizons.

And by now you're free.

AND NOW I’M FREE.

I have a bottle of cheap wine (that I bought for myself), a feeling of deep satisfaction at the amount of free cake and tiffin I consumed, a couple of cards that have made me cry, Amazon and restaurant gift cards, a lot of feelings, a possible avenue to make some small things change, and did I mention the whole lot of feelings.

Yeah. The shape is wrong, too.

Yeah. The costume doesn’t sit right for a real person, the silhouette’s wrong... They had Ray Stevenson in a fat suit for Volstagg iirc and it wasn’t right but it wasn’t... egregious. (Although in hindsight it super doesn’t make sense why they didn’t just... cast a fat person for Volstagg.)