firebatvillain

[firebatvillain]

[slams fists on table] There is MINIMAL evidence that the whole world of Middle Earth appears flat to Elves. There is MUCH MORE evidence that Elves live on a globe with everyone else (after the Fall of Númenor); they just have access—via ocean sailing, maybe only in a westward direction—to a tangential line leading off the globe to a bonus continent + local seas, which may or may not exist on a flat plane. (Note: not on the moon; the moon is a piece of glowing flower set in a small flying ship, steered by a guy who keeps getting distracted by his crush.) It’s called the “STRAIGHT ROAD”, not the “flat world”!!

It’s like this:

* There’s actually almost 0 evidence of anything really, because Tolkien’s worldbuilding is like the dril budget tweet and he spent $3,600/month on linguistics. But that’s why we should pay attention to word choice like “Straight ROAD”, ie a single path!

#fbv reblog #lotr #lord of the rings #the silmarillion #elves #tanoraqui #fbv queue

[firebatvillain]

i think of this ProZD video constantly its always so fucking funny

#fbv reblog #drawn-from-the-ground #mrpsychokiller #laugh rule #fbv queue

[firebatvillain]

I just....I just learned that there's a word in the English language...for when you run into someone to hug them with all the enthusiasm and strength you have....I learned that it's called glomp.

My God, English has so many words to describe physical intimacy, I'm in love

#fbv reblog #fbv queue #glomp #laugh rule

[firebatvillain]

#fbv reblog #fandom

[firebatvillain]

Fanlore runs into a small version of this problem when trying to preserve fan history too. Lots of posts, famous fanfics, etc disappear after a few years. Internet history in general is hard to document.

the internet is rotting, as Jonathan Zittrain noted in an important (but paywalled) 2021 Atlantic article. A huge percentage of the links on the internet are broken, and there is no single authoritative, accessible universal repository that keeps track of everything. It is frighteningly easy for crucial information to slip away. ...

The practice of making changes to an article without noting that you’ve made them is called “stealth editing,” and even the New York Times does it. ... The existence of stealth editing means that it’s difficult to trust that the version of an article you click on at any given moment is the article as it was originally published. ...

I also, to my alarm, realized just how dependent we are on private publications themselves to give us access to records of their own work. Often, they keep it payawalled behind locked gates and charge you admission if you want to have a look. There are lots of sources in the Chomsky book to which you have to subscribe if you want to verify, such as this 1999 story in the Los Angeles Times about NATO’s bombing of a bus in Yugoslavia. This is a story of national importance, far too overlooked at the time, but if you don’t subscribe to the LA Times, you need research library access or a workaround if you want to read it.

Thank God for the Internet Archive, whose Wayback Machine preserves as much of the internet as they can and is invaluable for researchers trying to figure out what was once housed at now-dead links. But the Internet Archive has its limits. Social media posts, YouTube videos, paywalled Substack posts, PDFs—all can be very difficult to track down after they disappear. If a politician tweets something embarrassing, for instance, and then deletes it, it might be preserved in a screenshot. But we know screenshots are easy to fake. So where do you turn to prove satisfactorily that something was in fact said? ...

it’s very easy to lose pieces of information that seem permanent. E-books, for instance, can be changed by their publisher without the changes even being noted. You might read a book on your Amazon Kindle one day and open it up the next day to look for a quote only to find that the quote has disappeared without a trace. The Guardian, for twenty years, hosted a copy of Osama bin Laden’s “letter to the American people,” an important historical document. After the letter went viral on TikTok, the Guardian removed it from the site entirely. The New Republic did the same after an article of theirs about Pete Buttigieg caused controversy. The documents in question can still be found, but only by digging through the Internet Archive. If that ever goes down, researchers will find that trying to piece together the online past is like trying to learn about a lost civilization from excavated fragments. ...

I think that in an age where people (rightly) don’t trust the information they’re getting to be true, it needs to be as easy as possible to do research. Instead, while we have better technology than ever for sifting through information, it’s still the case that the truth is paywalled and the lies are free. If you want to “do your own research” to check on the veracity of claims, you will run headlong into a maze of broken links, paywalls, and pop-ups. How can anyone hope to find the truth when it’s so elusive, trapped behind so many toll gates? 

#Nathan J. Robinson #theoutcastrogue #fbv reblog #fbv writes

[firebatvillain]

Often when I'm reading the Wikipedia article about some zoological group, there'll be a sentence near the start that says something like "[group] varies in size from [smallest species in group] to [largest species in group]". I always immediately click on the largest species. I love to see a huge version of a thing, it's usually some crazy monster that looks sick as hell, it's always worth seeing and I have a great time.

And then I say to myself, come on now, you don't want to be someone who's just interested in the big ones, see what the smallest one looks like. So with a sense of grim duty, I click. It's not even that small usually, most small things aren't like that little frog wrapped around someone's pinkie, they maybe look a bit like the juvenile version of a more median-sized species perhaps. But I nod appreciatively and I say out loud, "Gee yeah, that is a small one of those", and then go back to the main article I started at.

Now both links are purple. No one can accuse me of being narrow-minded or unjust, and I can read my article in peace.

#fbv reblog #toasthaste #valld

[firebatvillain]

4 days until wet rat wednesday

#fbv reblog #dreamerinsilico #ratposting

[firebatvillain]

Dungeon masters will tell you to roll dice without having a DC in mind

(It’s me, I’m Dungeon Masters)

#fbv reblog #fbv writes #xenosimp #toasthaste #D&D #firebatvillain #bibliolithid #just bringing back this oldie #fbv queue

[firebatvillain]

"This person has a secret onlyfans!" "This artist does NSFW commissions!" "This author writes porn on the side!" I cannot begin to tell you how swag and awesome that is.

#fbv reblog #beatrice otter #stargoyle

[firebatvillain]

Looking forward to this one! Maybe I can add some information about the exchanges I'm in...

Join Our April Editing Chat!

We’re holding our first editing chat of the year on our Discord!

Come join us on Saturday April 13th, 2:00am-4:00am UTC (what time is that for me?) to chat and and help expand and add to articles on Fanlore! Our theme for this editing chat is conventions, events, and exchanges.

Everyone is welcome - you don't need to have any experience with editing Fanlore to join in! We'll be happy to help you.

Hope to see you there!

#fbv reblog #fanlore #fanlore-wiki #fandom

[firebatvillain]

if you have to specify that your reminder is friendly it automatically sounds less friendly to me

#fbv reblog #toasthaste #I think that reminders inherently carry a certain degree of social pressure or implication of forgetfulness #so it's really hard for it to be friendly or for any statement about it being friendly to be taken at face value #I think the closest thing you could get would be if the reminder was sent automatically by computer #like an automatic message that goes out an hour before a meeting or something #there is otherwise always the looming idea of somebody trying to police your ability to remember things #even if they dont mean it that way

[firebatvillain]

Bullshit Jobs

#fbv reblog #beanytuesday #comic #fbv queue

[firebatvillain]

*boops you in spirit*

boop

#fbv writes #boop

[firebatvillain]

I already kind of miss booping. That was a fun day.

#fbv writes #boop

[firebatvillain]

... But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely boop.

And god said, “let there be boops;” and there was boops.

#boop #boops #fbv reblog #oh-i-could-never #fbv writes

[firebatvillain]

Let he who is without sin cast the first boop

#fbv writes #boop #the holy boople

[firebatvillain]

He who lives by the boop dies by the boop

Boop not lest ye be booped

#fbv writes #boop