Seeking Apotheosis

But it’s not too late! We can reclaim the worm spelling!

Second, there's another reason why "Wormtongue" doesn't mean what you think -- that's not a Tolkien original. He borrowed the name from somewhere else, where it's... let's go with ambiguously complimentary. Specifically:

As you can see, the more common translation is "serpent-tongue", but it's the same word. Worm, serpent, snake, dragon... they can all be orm. Not to be confused with this thing, which is an olm:

(I can't find any etymological link there, but it's tempting to imagine one, isn't it?)

Anyway, in the saga, Ormstungu isn't really an insult. It's kind of a compliment but it includes an implied criticism. See, Gunnlaug is a poet... you know what, here's the text.

... he was very well set up, thoroughly obstreperous in disposition, ambitious already at an early age, unyielding in everything, ruthless and an able poet, but rather a scurrilous one; he was called Gunnlaug Serpent-Tongue.

(Translation R. Quirk)

Another translation puts it like this:

... he was a great skald, but somewhat bitter in his rhyming, and therefore was he called Gunnlaug Worm-tongue.

(Translation W. Morris and E. Magnusson)

The term being translated as "scurrilous" or "bitter" is níðskár, which has cultural implications in saga-age Iceland that are hard to sum up in a single word. (The Cleasby-Vigfusson dictionary suggests "libellous", which I think is closer than either of the two above). What you need to know is that níða kind of means "to insult or shame" but... more so. Like "grounds for a blood feud" more so.

So the point is, he is called Ormstungu because (a) he's quite good with his words but (b) said words tend to be rather vicious. Maybe the closest English equivalent would be "sharp-tongued".

Now, you might say, "but Maniculum! just because it means such-and-such in this random 13th-century text doesn't prove it means the same thing in Tolkien! he could have come up with it independently and had a completely different implication in mind!"

Which, sure, good point, it's not like Tolkien was in the habit of borrowing names from Old Norse literature -- hold on, my copy of Ynglingasaga just fell off the shelf, let me check on that...

Of course that's just a coincidence, he didn't really get the name from Ynglingasaga. He got it from the Poetic Edda:

JUST REVEALED: In honor of the film’s 15th anniversary, Laika is bringing back their very first movie to the big screen.

We will find out in Alecto the Ninth whether Kiriona's chest has teeth or ribs.

She cites Final Fantasy and Animorphs as intros to SFF. On Animorphs: "Nobody's safe in that book. Everyone's dead by the end. It was an influence."

The 1.5 page outline of the Locked Tomb was written in the back of a notebook which Tamsyn was using to teach herself Latin. She has (except for the detail of Gideon being a fireman) followed this guide throughout.

She is still writing Alecto the Ninth. She feels tremendous pressure, primarily from herself, to produce a satisfactory ending.

On Tasha Suri saying she still doesn't know what Homestuck is after watching a 2 hour video about it: "Neither do I."

She says she is working through creating the balance between a Catholic worldview and the critique of imperialism. She hopes that the balance will be struck correctly. "I'm kinda worried about being excommunicated. For one scene in particular."

The Treaty is an agreement between Maori and the Crown, now the NZ government. It is the founding document of new zealand and is recognised as a constitutional document today; it is the only treaty of its kind/time still honoured, and it is the steps we’ve taken through the Treaty to provide restitution and build an ongoing relationship with Maori and their iwi (tribes) that has allowed the relationship between Maori and the government to thrive where other indigenous groups have struggled to achieve recognition of their rights.

This is going to be entirely undone. Not only is this issue inflammatory and a threat to race relations in Aotearoa, leaked documents show the proposed “reinterpretation” wants to negate pretty much the entirety of the legal rights provided to Maori under the treaty. For example, the treaty article that guarantees land rights for Maori will be reinterpreted to guarantee land rights for “all New Zealanders”. Which means this article would be essentially meaningless for Maori.

By removing Maori from the context they are trying to put Maori on an “equal footing” with all New Zealanders; they are riding the idea that Maori have special rights and privileges above that of the average New Zealander. Obviously this is bullshit but it’s effective rhetoric and there’s a grain of truth to in that the extent of Maori rights hadn’t been clearly defined due to the ongoing nature of the process. So this has got a lot of people with a poor grasp of the issues very upset and baying for change.

There is a hui (meeting) being held today for all the iwi to begin discussions of how Maori will respond to this. New Zealand politics isn’t very interesting usually, but our progress on indigenous rights, until now, has been absolutely ahead of the field. If you care about indigenous rights globally, you should care about this, because in the same way Australia’s referendum loss has spurred on this action, the loss of rights here will spur other right wing governments to be similarly bold to their own indigenous groups.

Indigenous rights in New Zealand are under attack. They are meeting today to discuss it, and New Zealand will be listening, but I want the world to be listening. Because our government needs the shame of being called out by more than just the people who they’ve already decided don’t vote for them.

Maori have a long and proud history of fighting for their rights, and they’ll do it again here. And I’ll be on the pickets beside them, but there’ll be plenty of my own pickets to attend, because this government is radical in every sense of the word.

I know. I found a pile of papers of mine from my teen years and into my early twenties recently, and there were so many stories begun, so many first pages of novels never written. I’d start them, and then I’d give up because they weren’t as brilliant as Ursula K Le Guin, or Roger Zelazny, or Samuel R Delany, and anyway I wasn’t actually sure what happened next.

I was around 22 when I started finishing things. They weren’t actually very good, and they all sounded like other people, but the finishing was the important bit. I kept going. A dozen stories and a book, and then I sold one (it wasn’t very good, and I had to cut it from 8,000 words to 4,000 to sell it, but I sold it). I probably wrote another half-dozen stories over the next year, and sold three. But now they were starting to sound like me. 

Think of it this way: if you wanted to become a juggler, or a painter, you wouldn’t start jugggling, drop something and give up because you couldn’t juggle broken bottles like Penn Jillette, or start a few paintings then give up because the thing in your head was better than what your hands were getting onto the paper. You carry on. You learn. You drop things. You learn about form and shape and shade and colour and how to draw hands without the fingers looking like noodles. You finish things, learn from what you got right and what you got wrong, and then you do the next thing.

Here is my little Pippin & Boromir Comic about Courage!!

To give a little bit of Context, first of all I completely made this up haha I imagine this happening sometimes after setting off from Rivendell but before the Mines of Moria! So in the book after Pippin was alone in Gondor for quite some while, he felt very isolated and alone, very little and weak. (especially after being separated from Merry) and there were times where he stood at the walls of Minas Tirith and looked into the Horizon and could see that you know things are about to happen haha so i asked myself if Pippin ever thought about Boromir during that time, I always felt like that they shared a special bond. Maybe Pip reminded Boromir of Faramir especially when they were younger!

This was in fact already on my tbr for reasons I entirely forgetbutyeah generally I'm a big fan of Tchaikovsky's (his latter work far more than his former), but that's going off a pretty limited sample.

This is the Takapuna Golf Course in Auckland, New Zealand.

It is in the middle of Auckland's north shore suburbs.

According to their website, they are one of the most popular golf courses in Aotearoa and have an annual visitor count of 60,000 people. They don't clarify if that is individual unique visitors or recounts, but lets be generous and say its unique visitors. 60,000, not bad.

This is Eden Park Stadium (the little square on the right) and oh look there's another golf course on the left there, ignore that one for now.

(the above two images are at the same scale)

Eden park has a capacity of 50,000 people. Ed Sheeran was here earlier this year and sold out the two nights he performed. That's 100,000 people in a weekend all in that little red square. 60,000 in a year no longer seems so great.

60,000 people per year is also only 160 people per day. 160 visitors to a golf course that is 470,000 square meters in area. Now the average property size in Auckland is 500 square meters. So the golf course takes up the area of 940 houses.

940 homes worth of land for 160 people.

And that is Auckland housing sizes. Auckland is horribly designed and very spread out. Let's instead look at Barcelona, considered one of the most well designed cities in the world.

This is Takapuna golf course side by side with Barcelona

(The scale is as close to being equal as I could get them, I don't have ArcGIS data for Barcelona so had to use google maps)

Each red square overlaid on Takapuna Golf Course is exactly 133m in height/width, the same size as each city block in Barcelona, road width included.

There are 23 Barcelona blocks worth of space in Takapuna Golf Course with room to spare. About 640 people live in each Barcelona block, that's 15000 people.

15000 peoples worth of homes and living spaces, sacrificed so 160 people can play golf in a day.

Now this is just one golf course in a big city, what's 15,000 people to a city of 1.6 million, who cares right?

Here is a wider shot of Auckland City.

Those red dots? They're golf courses.

There are 16 golf courses inside the metropolitan area of Auckland City (4 not pictured as Auckland is too spread out to get one clean screenshot). Keep in mind these are not rural golf courses out in the country, these are right beside housing developments and shopping malls. And for the record I could not find a single golf course in the Barcelona metropolitan area, you had to go out into the country before finding one.

So lets multiply that 15,000 people by 16 golf courses?

240,000 people.

With Auckland City's golf courses you could house 240,000 people comfortably with some good urban planning.

FIJMU News: 12-3-23 by P.L. Giarrist Jr.

Hbomberguy has been an excellent YouTube documentarian, most famous for actually liking Dark Souls 2. Beyond this strange behavior however, his videos are widely admired despite not even having a colossal stuffed porg in their background. Recently he uploaded a documentary on plagiarism, but is that video plagiarized? And indeed, is his whole channel? His very life?

We at FIJMU have found concerning evidence that Hbomberguy is in fact simply repeating another YouTuber, also named Hbomberguy: He even stole the original documentarian's name, and as seen above, wardrobe, wallpaper, and face. Hbomberguy did indeed make a nearly identical video to Hbomberguy's, and in a startling, perhaps AI enabled act of thievery, Hbomberguy uploaded an identical video at exactly the same time. Most deviously, the duplicate Hbomberguy video has also used the same link and YouTube address.

While some have claimed that we simply have two windows of the same video open, the truth remains to be discovered. Did Hbomberguy steal from Hbomberguy? We may never know, at least not for a while because I am still only halfway into his like 4 hour long video and he's barely into the cave part and the meta aspect of this is giving me a headache.

I'm also worried now about parts in my Valhalla trilogy where I directly quoted death metal lyrics as a reference because I wrote it when I was really into Metalocalypse but like it's a novel so it doesn't explicitly say what those are and though I've talked about it all at length like am I any better than that one lady who stole the whole documentary and treated everyone she knew badly and stuff? Probably.

BUT HOW CAN WE KNOW FOR SURE???