Not Even Reading Any Posts Today Just Scrollin And Boopin

i NEED to go wash my fucking hair it's so dirty it's annoying me. but I don't want to... bed so cozy... 😭

One of the things that’s really struck me while rereading the Lord of the Rings–knowing much more about Tolkien than I did the last time I read it–is how individual a story it is.

We tend to think of it as a genre story now, I think–because it’s so good, and so unprecedented, that Tolkien accidentally inspired a whole new fantasy culture, which is kind of hilarious. Wanting to “write like Tolkien,” I think, is generally seen as “writing an Epic Fantasy Universe with invented races and geography and history and languages, world-saving quests and dragons and kings.” But… But…

Here’s the thing. I don’t think those elements are at all what make The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings so good. Because I’m realizing, as I did not realize when I was a kid, that Tolkien didn’t use those elements because they’re somehow inherently better than other things. He used them purely because they were what he liked and what he knew.

The Shire exists because he was an Englishman who partially grew up in, and loved, the British countryside, and Hobbits are born out of his very English, very traditionalist values. Tom Bombadil was one of his kids’ toys that he had already invented stories about and then incorporated into Middle-Earth. He wrote about elves and dwarves because he knew elves and dwarves from the old literature/mythology that he’d made his career. The Rohirrim are an expression of the ancient cultures he studied. There are a half-dozen invented languages in Middle-Earth because he was a linguist. The themes of war and loss and corruption were important to him, and were things he knew intimately, because of the point in history during which he lived; and all the morality of the stories, the grace and humility and hope-in-despair, was an expression of his Catholic faith. 

J. R. R. Tolkien created an incredible, beautiful, unparalleled world not specifically by writing about elves and dwarves and linguistics, but by embracing all of his strengths and loves and all the things he best understood, and writing about them with all of his skill and talent. The fact that those things happened to be elves and dwarves and linguistics is what makes Middle-Earth Middle-Earth; but it is not what makes Middle-Earth good.

What makes it good is that every element that went into it was an element J. R. R. Tolkien knew and loved and understood. He brought it out of his scholarship and hobbies and life experience and ideals, and he wrote the story no one else could have written… And did it so well that other people have been trying to write it ever since.

So… I think, if we really want to write like Tolkien (as I do), we shouldn’t specifically be trying to write like linguists, or historical experts, or veterans, or or or… We should try to write like people who’ve gathered all their favorite and most important things together, and are playing with the stuff those things are made of just for the joy of it. We need to write like ourselves.

Uh. "knee" is a masculine noun in Portuguese. Idk what your coach was doing. It's "o joelho"...

i love it actually when nonnative speakers make mistakes that reveal how their native languages work.

lots of koreans online say they "eat" drinks which would assume they only have one word which covers the concept of consumption.

arabic immigrants in sweden (my mother included) have a hard time differentiating between "i think/i believe/my opinion is" which suggests that in arabic these different modalities of speaker agency is treated as one or at least interchangeable.

swedish speakers in english will use should/shall/have to/must with much higher nuance precision than native english speakers, to the point where they sound well awkward, because the distinction between these commands in swedish is much clearer than in english. i make mistakes between is/am/are and has/have constantly because swedish only has one pronoun covering all grammatical persons.

i've heard speakers of languages without gendered pronouns (finnish, the chinese dialects, and a tonne more) make he/she mistakes because it's hard(!!) to learn two or more gendered pronouns and when to use them correctly.

how neat is that?! it add a charm to international english usage in particular and make our appreciation of both our native languages and our learnt ones stronger...!!

Ill never stop blogging. I could become prime minister and youd still see me on here posting

do people really love drinking that much? that they celebrate their successes by drinking whiskey (which tastes like rubbing alcohol btw)??

I had a drink last night for the first time in months, a strawberry caipirinha, and by the 3rd sip, I was kinda regretting not having ordered a strawberry soda instead.

do people really enjoy the taste of alcohol that much?

Ill never stop blogging. I could become prime minister and youd still see me on here posting

MOO DENG Z LIŚCIEM

Update: Moo Deng with many leaves

i love digesting lactose it’s so easy to do

at the local Asian market...

I honestly think Ariana did a perfect job as Glinda because she kinda *is* our real-life Glinda. Shallow, pretty, popular, narcissistic, betraying people left and right for her own benefit... but under all of that, still human. I bet she regrets a lot of her questionable life choices.

what people need to understand is that ariana grande is able to pull off every single one of galinda's physical gags because that woman was in the comedy trenches of nickelodeon's victorious and anyone who was forced to show feet in front of dan schneider is walking away with a level of commitment to the bit that human beings were not built to perceive