Latest Posts by psyxe - Page 8
A bunch of my friends all moved into a big group house called Valinor. I’m not capable of living together with that many other people, but they were kind enough to let me have a small semidetached unit on the same property, which clearly has to be called Tol Eressea.
Even though I got the name kind of by coincidence, I’m happy with it. The theme of the Silmarillion is the conflict between serviam and non serviam. The Vanyar say serviam, and win eons of unbroken bliss by the sides of the gods - plus never appearing in the books again. The Noldor say non serviam, and get the short end of every stick in every wood on Middle-Earth - but are also objectively awesome and everyone’s favorite characters.
The Teleri of Tol Eressea don’t do either. They agree to follow the divine plan, then get distracted by various interesting rocks and pretty trees along the way and show up late for the boat to Paradise. When the gods schedule an extra boat trip just for them, they end up permanently settling on the boat, anchored just off the coast of Paradise - so they can say they technically accepted the offer to redeem them and take them to Heaven, but don’t actually have to live there. They support the divine plan, but they’re just really really not joiners. This is a perverse sort of religion and also one that I 100% identify with.
Tol Eressea is called the Lonely Isle, but I suspect it is “lonely” only in the way Andrew Marvell described Adam before the creation of Eve:
Such was that happy Garden state When Man there walked without a mate After a place so pure and sweet What other help could yet be meet? But ‘twas beyond a mortal’s share To wander solitary there. Two Paradises 'twere in one To be in Paradise alone.
Not all of the Teleri go to Tol Eressea. Elwe stays in Middle-Earth out of love. Cirdan stays out of duty. Others stay to pursue random distractions or their own weird #aesthetic. This is not a people given to spectacular sins of pride the way the Feanorians are. This is a people who accept Law, who love Order, who are willing to contribute and sacrifice as much to its upkeep as anyone else, to defend their comrades and their principles even to the death - but whose concept of Law and Order is basically the gods as a night-watchman state who let them do their own thing. And the gods accept. I know there are some earthly religions who would say this is not an available option - but in Arda, at least, the gods are pretty chill.
The Teleri end up being liminal - less the Sea-Elves than the Shore-Elves or Strand-Elves (see also: “Grey-Elves”). The West represents Paradise and Oblivion, the East represents the sublunary world in all its suffering - so the Teleri live on the eastern fringe of the West, the western fringe of the East, and most of all on the island in the middle.
They are also called the Falmari, or “Singers”. Poe wrote in “Israfel” that the angels sing more sweetly than mortals because their lives in Pardise are so much better than ours down below. Modern sympathies would side with the tortured artist, reverse Poe’s prediction and say that mortals would sing more sweetly - or at least more interestingly - because of the twists and turns of life. Tolkien puts his Falmari somewhere in between. He gives them the master Palantir - allowing them to see everything that goes on in the world of Men - but also gives them Calacirya, the gap in the mountains that allows glimpses of the very center of Paradise. The Singers live in full view both of the glories of Israfel and the horrors of Poe, and they don’t turn away from either. Their music is an attempt at a synthesis - just like the Music of the Ainur before them.
Because of their liminal status, the Teleri end up as conduits. They’re the ones who bring warnings from Valinor to the Numenoreans. They’re the ones who ferry returning exiles back across the Sea. And most important, when the world needed to send a message to the Valar, it was through the work of the Teleri Cirdan (who if you read closely is basically the most competent and impressive figure in the entire history of Middle-Earth), that Earendil was able to invoke the Valar, and the power of Melkor was broken forever.
(thus it is written: “a Teller is someone who calls down celestial energies”. Also, “a Singer is someone who tries to be good”.)
There’s something in all of this that resonates with me. I don’t believe in God, but I like Him. If He exists, I want to be on His side. And I’m surrounded by amazing people, with pseudo-divine plans of their own, and I want to be on their sides too. But I also know I’m not a joiner. I’m not a Vala, involved in the creation of the new world; nor a Vanya, wise and noble enough to utterly subordinate his will to the cause. But I would like to think I can at least be a Teleri - vaguely on the side of Good, working to defend it; not necessarily great at doing it strategically, but pursuing ends closely-enough allied to it that sometimes I’m in the right place at the right time to accomplish something that matters. And even though I am definitely the sort of person to get distracted by an interesting rock when I am supposed to be seeking the Utmost West - to think that overall by a special grace maybe this will serve some purpose for the gods and they will accept the bargain. I’d like to think that I’m in the right sort of liminal position to communicate what needs to be communicated, to those who know less than me - and occasionally to my betters - and that this can have some useful role before the end. So I will accept the name of Tol Eressea and I will build the Lonely Isle.
…except everyone else is already calling my semi-detached unit “the Scottage”, and I have to admit that’s also pretty clever.
“There is a somewhat obscure genre I’m really enjoying lately, which I will tentatively title ‘earnest atheist jewish buddhists attempt to derive catholicism from math’”
nearly my entire dash is people who were once into a fandom I was once into
(all different ones)
I think one of the best names of a real-world geographical location is “the Inaccessible Pinnacle of Sgùrr Dearg"
https://www.instagram.com/p/Bj3MxHxn2eE
... my apologies but do men really need even more coddling over how women being at an extreme risk of violence at men's hands makes things harder for men somehow?
Specific individual people who have never engaged in violence, and who are experiencing guilt and shame over being in a category with people who have, deserve reassurance that they’re responsible for their individual actions and only for their individual actions, and that it’s healthy for them to pursue their happiness while treating other people well.
Crimes aren’t committed by Men, they are committed by individual men (and by individual women, sometimes), and Men are not responsible for them, the attackers are.
To the extent that our society socializes people in ways which make them likelier to commit rape and violence, and likelier to get away with that, every one of us as individuals should be figuring out how we can avoid participating in that process and how we can send messages in the other direction. But the time and place for that conversation is not “this innocent person feels tremendous shame over attraction to women”, any more than that post was a good occasion to tell anon about how malaria nets can be cheaply purchased from the AMF and that you can send poor people money through GiveDirectly.
I want individual people to believe that they are accountable for their behavior but not for strangers’ behavior, and that they are not reducible to their gender. I want everyone equipped to participate in making society safer for victims of intimate violence, but I don’t want to achieve that at the expense of every possible conversation about sexuality and attraction, because conversations about sexuality and attraction are also really important.
Heard some important information on Twitter today, and thought I’d post it here for anyone who may not have heard it. This is actually a thing, devised by a human rights organisation called Karma Nirvana.
Reblog to save a life?
Just so you all know..
This blog is 100% anti PETA.
We love our vegetarian and vegan friends and family (and I have a lot of them!!). We don’t support an organization that claimes to love animals and does nothing but hurt them and the people who love them.
Hugs and support to my extended dog show family at Crufts.
A helpful guide to some common birds here in the western US
found while looking for my own tumblr
some force compelled me to make this image and share it. this is what happens when you’re up til’ 2:30 in the morning with the willpower to make a vision come true..but god. at what cost..
dataandphilosophy replied to your post “I just wanted to get on and read some rationalist posts on tumblr and…”
But Kelsey, how can I solve my problem of not having read the Silmarillion by converting to Orthodox Judaism?
Now that you’re observant of Shabbat and don’t use technology from sundown Friday-Saturday, you have a lot of free time, which like any sensible person you spend catching up on all the books you want to read. Thrilled at the prospect of ensnaring someone in two of my interests at once, I send you a pocket Siddur and a pocket Silmarillion, and you end up reading them at the same time, having strange dreams, and writing a long, revolutionary essay on the compatibility of Beresheit with Middle-earth’s revised cosmology. The Christians get mad at us for cultural appropriation.
another day, another dollar, another instance of wanting to write a long post calling out the 2015 discourse’s massive, massive classism problem but not wanting to invite the wank and criticism it would induce
but in short: the rural poor are not your punching bags for jokes about homophobia, trump supporters, and fat ugly americans, and poor people as a whole are grossly underrepresented in talking about marginalization and are not included in discussions about the issues that affect them directly. and a massive part of that comes from there not being a vanguard of like, Poor Academics the way that there are Feminist Academics and Queer Academics and Black Academics and so forth. every other institutionally marginalized group is represented in academia but because of the inherent lack of opportunity to pursue higher education that comes along with being poor, poor people’s voices aren’t really heard to the same degree.
not to mention that structural and institutional poverty is a problem that can only really be solved by politicians, and the problem is that right wing politicians have a vested interest in keeping poor people poor and uneducated so that they will continue to vote against their own interests and effectively continue to marginalize themselves, and meanwhile said conservative politicians keep their jobs and nothing changes. and even well-meaning leftist economists can’t do anything about it.
and MEANWHILE, youth activism is so intently focused on gender and race to the exclusion of class because most activists are college students, who have not really had to deal with the effects of Poverty with a capital P. see also: the difference between being poor and being broke. and activist language policing is so inherently classist in the first place because it serves to exclude and silence anyone who doesn’t have an academic background or the free time to read blog after blog on the internet to figure out why, exactly, using that word or that asterisk is so offensive and makes you such a terrible person even if your intent is, actually, good. so much of activism requires a significant time investment and a certain level of education that people who work minimum wage jobs and have families just cannot afford. so because they’re insufficiently educated, they’re regarded as insufficiently oppressed or treated like they’re actively part of the problem.
(not to mention the internet’s obsession with degrading service workers who are employed by problematic – ugh that word, but it’s the one that fits – companies. “we went to party city and threw all the racist costumes on the floor!” “we vandalized the ‘girl toy’ and ‘boy toy’ signs at target!” literally nothing enrages me more than this.)
see also: the co-option of the term “emotional labor,” which originated as a phrase coined to describe the mental and physical toll of the requirement for service industry workers to display cheerful, positive emotions toward customers, which has been bastardized by middle-class feminists to refer to standard politeness and talking about feelings within any form of relationship, be it with a friend, significant other, or parent.
i could go on and on. i won’t, because i already wrote way more than i intended. it’s a massive, massive intersectionality fail. i’m just so tired of it.
A lot of people use tumblr for a mix of personal posts and fandom/ aesthetic/ whatever else posts. And the funny thing about that is just, followers can just kinda come and go at random. They have no sense of what the continuity is with these personal posts. They’re joining spontaneously in the middle with no context of what the blogger has been blogging about for years. They just saw a a good piece of Gravity Falls fanart in the tag and hit follow.
From the blog owner’s perspective the personal posts make up one long coherent narrative about what’s been happening in their life, posts building on older posts, updates about changing schools and jobs and houses, personal threads of drama and conflict. Meanwhile unsuspecting Gravity Falls fan hits follow five years into the blog’s existence and the first thing on their dash is Update, part 47, yes my head is still stuck in the fence. good news is i can now reach the garden hose so i have a steady stream of water to lap up. Jonathon has not returned with the butter
Today, In Public Speaking Class
The professor was giving us protocols for formal interaction. He said it was important to introduce people of higher rank first when introducing multiple people. As an intuitive Socialist, I was annoyed by all of these, since everyone is a comrade. However, some of these were worse than others:
The order, by rank and status, was as follows:
Bishops before priests
Prime ministers before cabinet ministers
Bosses before employees
Teachers before students
Parents before children
Men before women
…What the serious fuck
babies need more than one error message
rn it’s just like “you are clearly upset about SOMETHING, I am VERY MOTIVATED to fix it, and I have NO IDEA WHAT IT IS”
Something I’m not 100% sure how to put into words b/c flu but nonetheless woke up thinking about is:
it’s so disappointing when fiction that purports to show the “villain’s side of the story” actually just flips the roles, making the original villain a precious cinnamon roll and the original hero 100% garbage. it’s such a lazy narrative and it makes me wonder if you’ve really thought about *why* you want to tell the story you’re telling.
and like – there’s nothing *wrong* with just writing a power fantasy wherein your villainous fave comes out on top. but it’s always kind of unnerving to me when fandom will jump on those narratives without fully thinking them through, and thus react just as vitriolically to the new villain as an older audience did to the original.
Maleficent has this problem, Orange Is the New Black has this problem, The Shape of Water to some degree has this problem (though concentrated in the fandom and not necessarily in del Toro’s narrative). it’s really bizarre to me how people will walk into a “villain redeemed” narrative and come out with their hatred intact, just shifted to a new, more “deserving” target. like, do you not see how recursive that is? and are you not just a little bit troubled by the knowledge that your sympathies are that easy to manipulate by a shift in narrator?
again, it’s fine if it’s just a power fantasy, but if you’re trying to make any kind of overarching point about villains and narratives and redemption, it’s at least *prudent* not to just switch the vantage points.
me to baby, after twenty minutes of trying to get him to chill: …and if that purple yacht gets sunk, Mama’s gonna buy you a pickup truck. And if there’s a pickup truck recall, Mama’s gonna buy you a wrecking ball. And if that gets CPS involved, Mama’s gonna buy you an age-appropriate doll -
me to baby, after forty minutes: …and if Olympus Mons gets razed, Mama’s gonna buy you some flying sleighs. And if the flying sleighs get banned, Mama’s gonna buy you a Congressman. And if he still won’t pass your bill, Mama’s gonna buy you a Silmaril. And if that starts an awful war, Mama’s gonna buy you a dinosaur. And if your dino won’t ride to battle, Mama’s gonna buy you a magic saddle -
Me, a disgraced academic turned farmer, surveying my crops: Finally... I am out standing in my field
I am coming for all the monsters that ever touched him, I am coming for all the ones who twisted his stars into shadows, They turned him into a nightmare, So I’m going to be theirs.
and they’ll never wake up // k.s. (via worthystevie)
please please expand on your list of Things Which Have Actually Worked, your ask box ghost wants to hear about this
I have the best ask box ghost and I’m sorry to have gone so long without responding to this; I wanted to wait till I was in a place where I could give it the thought and attention it deserves. <3
(Original post here. I totally encourage other people to share their lists of Things Which Have Actually Worked; that seems like the sort of valuable information which is really useful to have available.)
(Cut for length, and various mental illness stuff.)
Keep reading
i found a d20 in my kitchens junk drawer and i absentmindedly rolled it and got a 1 and was like, aw dunk, and then i immediately stubbed my toe into the trashcan while trying (and missing) to throw something away
So in russian, nouns are either animate or inanimate gramatically, depending on whether they move.
Well, the russian word for corpse, мертвец, is animate, which raises quite a few terrifying questions about russia’s past
So Delta flight 302 flew in to San Juan, picked up passengers, and threaded one arm of Irma on the way out. The pilot basically said “hold my beer” and took on a hurricane.
I am not entirely convinced that Poe Dameron was not flying this plane, to be honest.
You can read the Twitter thread here.
Look at this thing. LOOK AT IT
Our civilisation will be known to future archaeologists as the “Little Plastic Piece People”.
i typed “horg” into the search bar and found this site which taxonomically categorizes those little plastic clips you find on bread bags
A GUIDE FOR YOUNG LADIES ENTERING THE SERVICE OF THE FAIRIES, by Rosamund Hodge
I.
This is the lie they will use to break you: no one else has ever loved this way before.
II.
Choose wisely which court you serve. Light or Dark, Summer or Winter, Seelie or Unseelie: they have many names, but the pith of the choice is this: a poisoned flower or a knife in the dark?
(The difference is less and more than you might think.)
Of course, this is only if you go to them for the granting of a wish: to save your father, sister, lover, dearest friend. If you go to get someone back from them, or—most foolish of all—because you fell in love with one of them, you will have no choice at all. You must go to the ones that chose you.
III.
Be kind to the creature that guards your door. Do not mock its broken, bleeding face.
It will never help you in return. But I assure you, someday you will be glad to know that you were kind to something once.
IV.
Do not be surprised how many other mortal girls are there within the halls. The world is full of wishing and of wanting, and the fairies love to play with human hearts.
You will meet all kinds: the terrified ones, who used all their courage just getting there. The hopeful ones, who think that love or cleverness is enough to get them home. The angry ones, who see only one way out. The cold ones, who are already half-fairy.
I would tell you, Do not try to make friends with any of them, but you will anyway.
V.
Sooner or later (if you serve well, if you do not open the forbidden door and let the monster eat you), they will tell you about the game.
Summer battles Winter, Light battles Dark. This is the law of the world. And on the chessboard of the fairies, White battles Black.
In the glory of this battle, the pieces that are brave and strong may win their heart’s desire.
VI.
You already have forgotten how the mortal sun felt upon your face. You already know the bargain that brought you here was a lie.
If you came to save your sick mother, you fear she is dead already. If you came to free your captive sister, your fear she will be sent to Hell for the next tithe. If you came for love of an elf-knight, you are broken with wanting him, and yet he does not seem to know you.
Say yes.
Keep reading
honestly I wish I could dedicate myself to being a giant fucking inconvenience as much as the phantom of the opera did