Update: Sauron is not afraid of hobbits. He was unaware that hobbits existed up until very recently. he literally did not have time to be afraid of them, they went from a 0 to 100 threat level in twenty seconds. There he was, minding his own business worrying about the usual Elves and Men when suddenly these kids are on his lawn and now he’s dead, like just;
What did— who–
did I just get one-shotted by an infant how is this occurring
Honestly I have to love this whole thought process that the Fellowship must have cultivated in Sauron, like…
“These children have found the Ring! But they’re taking it to the elves, of course. I will simply have to catch them on the way.”
“Well, the elves are still not to be trifled with, it seems. It looks as though they have a group of intrepid heroes, how cute! Wait, who’s leading them? Aw, hell.”
“OKAY! Olorin’s out of the way, and now I can finally kill them all and reclaim the- OH DAMMIT, IT’S IN LOTHLORIEN.”
“Well, okay. They’ve taken it onward. Curunir says one of the halflings is still carrying the ring, so he’s going to capture them and we’ll see how this develops. Thankfully Olorin’s still out of the picture and their little group just shattered into pieces, so that’s one less thing to worry about.”
“Aaaaaand Curunir shat the bed. Excellent. Trees, who would have thought? Okay, so we’re back to plan A: conquer Gondor, because if the Ring’s going to be anywhere, it’ll be there.”
“Wait, who’s on the– Isildur’s WHAT? Ohhhh. Ohohoho. Oh now everything makes sense. Isildur’s Heir is back, and he’s here being all prideful again. That’s fine. Really. I’ll just crush him and his kingdom, and then nobody can stop me!”
“WHAT? FUCKING WHAT? THEY SENT HIM BACK? Ugh, alright, alright, I’m cool, I’m fine. He’s still got that stupid wizard costume on, and I’m still stronger than he ever was. It’s not like he can come toe to toe with me, even if he does have an army behind him. This’ll be fine.”
“They’re… actually marching on the Black Gate? Sweet lord, I didn’t think they’d actually do it! This is perfect, everyone’s right here! Olorin, the human princeling, most of the remaining fighting forces of Men, all I have to do is kill them now and– Wait. Someone just put on the Ring. Someone just– That’s a halfling. They’re inside the mouNTAIN OH GOD NAZGUL GO GO G–”
…aaaaaand curtain.
you can laugh but that is literally what happened
This is the single best brief summary I have ever seen of the entire point of the Lord of the Rings trilogy.
Does anyone remember a post circulating back in April about an LGBTQ bookstore in Ann Arbor? They posted a status on Facebook about how they didn’t have any books sales that day?
The post circulated tumblr for a couple of days and their Facebook page was swarmed with likes and support, suddenly they had more online orders than they ever had before. They announced that had roughly 700 online orders with only a staff of three people and a dog to fill them, and even with the deluge of orders they would still be struggling to stay open.
Unfortunately, that’s how the story is winding up for them. They recently announced that they would be closing and I thought it’d be nice to send them off with one last hoorah!
If you have the available funds, then maybe consider helping them out. Here’s a link to their website. It may not be a great start to the New Year, but it may make it easier for them,
so here’s a fun story about this movie. guess who loves this movie? me! i do! i love this movie. i love this movie so much that when i was in the 7th grade and i saw “first wives club 2” on pay per view i was like: HELL YEAH!! FIRST WIVES CLUB TWO!! NO ONE TOLD ME THERE WAS A SEQUEL!!!
here’s the synopsis for first wives club 2:
disgruntled first wives take their ex-husbands’ new lovers under their wing.
sounds great, right? awesome viewing material for a precocious 11-year-old.
so i buy this movie, and like, three minutes into it i’m starting to feel suspicious?? like it’s really low quality and my girls are nowhere in sight?? how come none of the first wives are the same?? how come they’re alone in a bedroom with mood lighting?? why is she taking off her shirt?? why are they both taking off their shirts?? WHY ARE THEY–
here’s what i did not know about first wives club 2:
it is a lesbian porno of no relation to the beloved 1996 classic.
so of course i, horrified that i’ve accidentally bought porn on my family’s account (and in that state of panic that kids work themselves into whenever anything regarding sex is mentioned), quickly shut off the TV and go upstairs and watch an episode of veggie tales to like, cleanse my soul and apologize to jesus, and that’s that.
EXCEPT, OF COURSE:
you have to pay for pay per view.
so the end of the month comes and i have completely put this incident out of my mind, haha, i accidentally bought porn, how funny, TELL NO ONE. right? and i’m sitting at a nice dinner with my mother, my stepfather, and my very religious aunt deb, and we’re just talking about farm things, whatever, when suddenly my mother puts her fork down and says, “okay, there’s something we need to discuss. as a family.”
AS A FAMILY.
and i’m like, running through a list of people i know who could conceivably be dead, and fantasizing about my mother announcing that she’s going to buy me My Own Computer Just Because U Earned It Kiddo, and she pulls out a piece of paper that says DIRECTV across the top. and i’m like: OH NO.
“i received the tv bill today,” my mother said, and i was like, shoveling potatoes into my mouth as fast as i could because i knew that when i went to PORN PRISON they weren’t going to feed me this kind of quality starch. “does anybody want to tell me who purchased the pornography?”
as a reminder, a quick table survey:
my mother, surprised and disappointed by the porn bill (innocent)
my stepfather, a grumbly old cowboy who just wants to sing along to kenny chesney and watch the hunt for red october (innocent)
my aunt deb, a super religious catholic whose best friend is a nun named Sister Placid (innocent)
me, the 11-year-old with a mouthful of potatoes who definitely purchased the lesbian pornography
silence.
my mother said, “i’m not going to ask again.”
silence.
my aunt looked at my stepdad. my stepdad looked at my aunt. NOBODY LOOKED AT ME, THE 11-YEAR-OLD WITH A MOUTHFUL OF POTATOES WHO DEFINITELY PURCHASED THE LESBIAN PORNOGRAPHY.
my mother shook her head and put the bill down. “this was incredibly inappropriate,” she said. “skip, deb, whoever. buy that shit on your own time. i’m not paying for it. what if molly had seen it?”
WHAT IF MOLLY HAD SEEN IT?
“don’t expose my kid to that crap.”
DON’T
EXPOSE
MY KID
TO THAT CRAP
“if you want to watch porn, fine, but do it in private and don’t expect me to pay for it. i can’t believe one of you did that in the living room.”
I CAN’T BELIEVE ONE OF YOU DID THAT
IN THE LIVING ROOM
but molly, why didn’t you own up to it and explain that it was an accident?
are you fucking kidding
i did not want to go to porn prison
the fun conclusion to this story is that i never owned up to it, which means that there are 3 people in the world who have not solved the mystery of the lesbian porn. a quick survey:
my mother, who lives every day wondering whose porn she paid for
my stepfather, who probably wishes he knew less about his wife’s sister’s porn preferences
my aunt, who probably wishes she knew less about her sister’s husband’s porn preferences
but molly, why don’t you own up to it now, with the safety of time and distance and the knowledge that porn prison isn’t real?
i don’t even know what to say.
Anyone who sees this PLEASE READ and fill out the petition!!!!!
While the Children in Flint Were Given Poisoned Water to Drink, General Motors Was Given a Special Hookup to the Clean Water. A few months after Governor Snyder removed Flint from the clean fresh water we had been drinking for decades, the brass from General Motors went to him and complained that the Flint River water was causing their car parts to corrode when being washed on the assembly line. The Governor was appalled to hear that GM property was being damaged, so he jumped through a number of hoops and quietly spent $440,000 to hook GM back up to the Lake Huron water, while keeping the rest of Flint on the Flint River water. Which means that while the children in Flint were drinking lead-filled water, there was one — and only one — address in Flint that got clean water: the GM factory.
For Just $100 a Day, This Crisis Could’ve Been Prevented. Federal law requires that water systems which are sent through lead pipes must contain an additive that seals the lead into the pipe and prevents it from leaching into the water. Someone at the beginning suggested to the Governor that they add this anti-corrosive element to the water coming out of the Flint River. “How much would that cost?” came the question. “$100 a day for three months,” was the answer. I guess that was too much, so, in order to save $9,000, the state government said f*** it — and as a result the State may now end up having to pay upwards of $1.5 billion to fix the mess.
There’s More Than the Lead in Flint’s Water. In addition to exposing every child in the city of Flint to lead poisoning on a daily basis, there appears to be a number of other diseases we may be hearing about in the months ahead. The number of cases in Flint of Legionnaires Disease has increased tenfold since the switch to the river water. Eighty-seven people have come down with it, and at least ten have died. In the five years before the river water, not a single person in Flint had died of Legionnaires Disease. Doctors are now discovering that another half-dozen toxins are being found in the blood of Flint’s citizens, causing concern that there are other health catastrophes which may soon come to light.
People’s Homes in Flint Are Now Worth Nothing Because They Cant Be Sold. Would you buy a house in Flint right now? Who would? So every homeowner in Flint is stuck with a house that’s now worth nothing. That’s a total home value of $2.4 billion down the economic drain. People in Flint, one of the poorest cities in the U.S., don’t have much to their name, and for many their only asset is their home. So, in addition to being poisoned, they have now a net worth of zero. (And as for employment, who is going to move jobs or start a company in Flint under these conditions? No one.) Has Flint’s future just been flushed down that river?
While They Were Being Poisoned, They Were Also Being Bombed. Here’s a story which has received little or no coverage outside of Flint. During these two years of water contamination, residents in Flint have had to contend with a decision made by the Pentagon to use Flint for target practice. Literally. Actual unannounced military exercises – complete with live ammo and explosives – were conducted last year inside the city of Flint. The army decided to practice urban warfare on Flint, making use of the thousands of abandoned homes which they could drop bombs on. Streets with dilapidated homes had rocket-propelled grenades fired upon them. For weeks, an undisclosed number of army troops pretended Flint was Baghdad or Damascus and basically had at it. It sounded as if the city was under attack from an invading army or from terrorists. People were shocked this could be going on in their neighborhoods. Wait – did I say “people?” I meant, Flint people. As with the Governor, it was OK to abuse a community that held no political power or money to fight back. BOOM!
The Wife of the Governor’s Chief of Staff Is a Spokeswoman for Nestle, Michigan’s Largest Owner of Private Water Reserves. As Deep Throat told Woodward and Bernstein: “Follow the money.” Snyder’s chief of staff throughout the two years of Flint’s poisoning, Dennis Muchmore, was intimately involved in all the decisions regarding Flint. His wife is Deb Muchmore, who just happens to be the spokesperson in Michigan for the Nestle Company – the largest owner of private water sources in the State of Michigan. Nestle has been repeatedly sued in northern Michigan for the 200 gallons of fresh water per minute it sucks from out of the ground and bottles for sale as their Ice Mountain brand of bottled spring water. The Muchmores have a personal interest in seeing to it that Nestles grabs as much of Michigan’s clean water was possible – especially when cities like Flint in the future are going to need that Ice Mountain.
In Michigan, from Flint water, to Crime and Murder, to GM Ignition Switches, It’s a Culture of Death. It’s not just the water that was recklessly used to put people’s lives in jeopardy. There are many things that happen in Flint that would give one the impression that there is a low value placed on human life. Flint has one of the worst murder and crime rates in the country. Just for context, if New York City had the same murder rate as Flint, Michigan, the number of people murdered last year in New York would have been almost 4,000 people – instead of the actual 340 who were killed in NYC in 2015. But it’s not just street crime that makes one wonder about what is going on in Michigan. Last year, it was revealed that, once again, one of Detroit’s automakers had put profit ahead of people’s lives. General Motors learned that it had installed faulty ignition switches in many of its cars. Instead of simply fixing the problem, mid-management staff covered it up from the public. The auto industry has a history of weighing the costs of whether it’s cheaper to spend the money to fix the defect in millions of cars or to simply pay off a bunch of lawsuits filed by the victims surviving family members. Does a cynical, arrogant culture like this make it easy for a former corporate CEO, now Governor, turn a blind eye to the lead that is discovered in a municipality’s drinking water?
Don’t Call It “Detroit Water” — It’s the Largest Source of Fresh Drinking Water in the World. The media keeps saying Flint was using “Detroit’s water.” It is only filtered and treated at the Detroit Water Plant. The water itself comes from Lake Huron, the third largest body of fresh water in the world. It is a glacial lake formed over 10,000 years ago during the last Ice Age and it is still fed by pure underground springs. Flint is geographically the last place on Earth where one should be drinking poisoned water.
ALL the Children Have Been Exposed, As Have All the Adults, Including Me. That’s just a fact. If you have been in Flint anytime from April 2014 to today, and you’ve drank the water, eaten food cooked with it, washed your clothes in it, taken a shower, brushed your teeth or eaten vegetables from someone’s garden, you’ve been exposed to and ingested its toxins. When the media says “9,000 children under 6 have been exposed,” that means ALL the children have been exposed because the total number of people under the age of 6 in Flint is… 9,000! The media should just say, “all.” When they say “47 children have tested positive”, that’s just those who’ve drank the water in the last week or so. Lead enters the body and does it’s damage to the brain immediately. It doesn’t stay in the blood stream for longer than a few days and you can’t detect it after a month. So when you hear “47 children”, that’s just those with an exposure in the last 48 hours. It’s really everyone.
This Was Done, Like So Many Things These Days, So the Rich Could Get a Big Tax Break. When Governor Snyder took office in 2011, one of the first things he did was to get a multi-billion dollar tax break passed by the Republican legislature for the wealthy and for corporations. But with less tax revenues, that meant he had to start cutting costs. So, many things – schools, pensions, welfare, safe drinking water – were slashed. Then he invoked an executive privilege to take over cities (all of them majority black) by firing the mayors and city councils whom the local people had elected, and installing his cronies to act as “dictators” over these cities. Their mission? Cut services to save money so he could give the rich even more breaks. That’s where the idea of switching Flint to river water came from. To save $15 million! It was easy. Suspend democracy. Cut taxes for the rich. Make the poor drink toxic river water. And everybody’s happy.
Guys if ur gonna scroll past this at least read number 5. I haven’t seen stuff to confirm this but i just looked it up and it’s true, and they didn’t even warn the community that they were going to be doing military testing. This is unprecedented torture by the government.
1. There are old gods who no longer have much of a supernatural staff, and make no appearances; but, rather in the manner of earthly ex-leaders, they have in common some fragments of standard infrastructure: for example, libraries, museums, monuments and so forth. For example, there is Bast’s old cat sanctuary down a backstreet in Cairo, and sometimes there is still music and dancing there if you know which festivals to go on.
2. The museum of Somnos can be found under Rome. It is not very interesting, and the exhibits are hypnotically repetitive; there are around thirty dimly-lit rooms in succession which all contain more or less the same things. Do make sure to check out the displays of poppies on the way in. There are also many soft couches. A score is kept at the exit of those who have made it through the museum without at least yawning a little. It is usually low.
3. Unfortunately, the swimming pool of Poseidon is a hundred metres or so underwater, in the Aegean. As a result, it is usually empty (aside from seahorses and the like). Those who manage to visit will be pleased to find that there are no queues and the waterslides are always operational, even after all this time.
4. Anansi maintains a fine library just outside of Accra, except only that it has no books. Instead, it is filled with storytellers; the price of entry being at least one story. It is a little webby up at the ceiling, but generally the spiders keep to themselves and you are unlikely to have any significant tricks pulled on you unless you start wiping at them. If your story is particularly good, you may even find that you have a small and many-eyed audience above you. There are few other places one can hear the sound of many spiders clapping their little feet at once.
5. Then again, some of the libraries have been less than successful. The library of Hephaestus is a beautiful place but, owing to its unfortunate tendency to keep burning down, very few books remain there. It can be found on Lemnos: it make a nice shady stopover except when it is on fire, but if you arrive when it is on fire you can always use it to toast some bread, so your walk will not have been wasted.
6. There is only a monument to Xolotl; it is a large metal spike on a hill, and ghostly dogs gather underneath. I hear that it is somewhere on the Western edge of the Valley of Mexico. The best time to visit is during a thunderstorm, for values of ‘best’ appropriate to Xolotl.
7. The library of Dionysus might be more accurately described as a bar. It is a little like that London bookshop at which the proprietor hands out sherry, only significantly more so. Not only are the patrons drunk, so are the books. They have all been inhaling the fumes for so long that many of the characters have quite forgotten their purpose and lie collapsed at the bottom of the page in giggling heaps.
“do you think the gods can die?” asks a girl, mindlessly drawing in the sand with a stick. the playground is a bit less busy than usual, the gray skies and occasional rain too discouraging for most. the boy stops digging a hole with his plastic shovel.
“gods? my mom told me there’s only one god”
“oh, that’s interesting!” the girls’ eyes light up “can this one die?”
“I don’t know, I can ask my mom and tell you tomorrow.” the boy says, starting to dig again. the sand is wet, perfect for building a castle.
“and what does your dad tell you? does he have one of his own?” asks the girl.
“my dad says there is no such thing as god but mom is upset every time I repeat that.”
“quite right she’s upset, it’s incredibly boring!” the girls says, throwing her stick behind her. more important things are on her mind now. “but I wonder if my gods can die. do you think it’d be rude to ask?”
“your mom?”
“no, my gods. I don’t think my mom knows, I think she’s too busy to think about things like that. which is a shame, really.”
“how do you ask your gods?” the boy furrows his eyebrows. “aren’t gods too busy to think about such things, too?”
the girl frowns for a moment. “maybe” she says, but turns around to get the stick again. “but I’ll ask anyway”
she goes to the other part of the sandbox and writes in sand with the stick until it breaks.
“dear gods sorry to bother you. is it possible for you to die?”
the children sit for a while, looking at the crooked letters. and suddenly all the clouds disappear, and the sky is blue and bright again, and the warm sun starts shining on the messy playground and messy children.
“the old gods are dead” says a man, bitter pride and mockery in his voice “if they were even alive at all”
the next time he oversleeps and hurries to work, he cannot find his keys - he had a habit of forgetting where he put them, but they would suddenly turn up somewhere. this time, they’re nowhere to be found.
he’s one coin short for the parking meter - and this time he doesn’t find any on the ground, even though usually he was lucky enough to find exactly what he needed.
he buys flowers for his wife and they wither and wilt before he manages to get home, dried petals and dead leaves in his hand.
the neighbour’s dog stopped wagging his tail at him, the cat doesn’t let him pet her. they’re unsure, wary.
when he lies awake at night, fighting his thoughts, the sleep doesn’t want to come. and when he sleeps, he doesn’t dream anymore.
when he sits alone in the dark, the night is not comforting anymore, not calming. the darkness is empty and lonely - threatening even.
there is no fire in his soul when he hears his favourite song, no will or need to dance. food doesn’t bring him joy anymore, nor drink. the passion is gone.
when he goes into the forest, the path slithers and knots, and he can’t find his way. the trees, his old friends, are suddenly indifferent. he’s lost in the woods for the first time in his life.
“for the second time” he hears a voice “you were six then, a lost crying boy. we were there to comfort you. not asleep, not dead. and not blind or deaf” the gods whisper. “are you so sure that we’re gone now?”
the man apologizes, struggling to fight his tears. he truly is sorry, and the gods listen. they’re old, after all, and know all the human vices and weaknesses - and know how to forgive when they so desire.
