James Baldwin.

In honor of watching the last 4 episodes of Rings of Power S2 for the first time yesterday, I feel like commemorating this philosophy.

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my dream of learning a little of everything gets a lot easier when they're all related :D

So the other night during D&D, I had the sudden thoughts that:

1) Binary files are 1s and 0s

2) Knitting has knit stitches and purl stitches

You could represent binary data in knitting, as a pattern of knits and purls…

You can knit Doom.

However, after crunching some more numbers:

The compressed Doom installer binary is 2.93 MB. Assuming you are using sock weight yarn, with 7 stitches per inch, results in knitted doom being…

3322 square feet

Factoring it out…302 people, each knitting a relatively reasonable 11 square feet, could knit Doom.

Never have I felt so much like a protagonist

your protagonist doesn’t need to save the world. maybe they just need to save their plant collection, one dying ficus at a time.

Astronaut tweets

Also: I think Aragorn gets a bad reputation now because so many lesser franchises have tried to imitate his archetype without understanding why he works. In the original movies he’s just a big gentle sad guy with a sword, who knows he’s not the real hero of the story and dedicates himself to supporting those gay little hobbits. The aragorn knockoffs are not his fault

big fan of: used bookstores, and 80s fantasy covers

“Fairy tale does not deny the existence of sorrow and failure: the possibility of these is necessary to the joy of deliverance. It denies (in the face of much evidence, if you will) universal final defeat…giving a fleeting glimpse of Joy; Joy beyond the walls of the world, poignant as grief.” ― J.R.R. Tolkien.

Terry Pratchett about fantasy ❤

Terry Pratchett interview in The Onion, 1995 (x)

O: You’re quite a writer. You’ve a gift for language, you’re a deft hand at plotting, and your books seem to have an enormous amount of attention to detail put into them. You’re so good you could write anything. Why write fantasy?

Terry: I had a decent lunch, and I’m feeling quite amiable. That’s why you’re still alive. I think you’d have to explain to me why you’ve asked that question.

O: It’s a rather ghettoized genre.

Terry: This is true. I cannot speak for the US, where I merely sort of sell okay. But in the UK I think every book— I think I’ve done twenty in the series— since the fourth book, every one has been one the top ten national bestsellers, either as hardcover or paperback, and quite often as both. Twelve or thirteen have been number one. I’ve done six juveniles, all of those have nevertheless crossed over to the adult bestseller list. On one occasion I had the adult best seller, the paperback best-seller in a different title, and a third book on the juvenile bestseller list. Now tell me again that this is a ghettoized genre.

O: It’s certainly regarded as less than serious fiction.

Terry: (Sighs) Without a shadow of a doubt, the first fiction ever recounted was fantasy. Guys sitting around the campfire— Was it you who wrote the review? I thought I recognized it— Guys sitting around the campfire telling each other stories about the gods who made lightning, and stuff like that. They did not tell one another literary stories. They did not complain about difficulties of male menopause while being a junior lecturer on some midwestern college campus.

Fantasy is without a shadow of a doubt the ur-literature, the spring from which all other literature has flown. Up to a few hundred years ago no one would have disagreed with this, because most stories were, in some sense, fantasy. Back in the middle ages, people wouldn’t have thought twice about bringing in Death as a character who would have a role to play in the story. Echoes of this can be seen in Pilgrim’s Progress, for example, which hark back to a much earlier type of storytelling. The epic of Gilgamesh is one of the earliest works of literature, and by the standard we would apply now— a big muscular guys with swords and certain godlike connections— That’s fantasy. The national literature of Finland, the Kalevala. Beowulf in England. I cannot pronounce Bahaghvad-Gita but the Indian one, you know what I mean. The national literature, the one that underpins everything else, is by the standards that we apply now, a work of fantasy.

Now I don’t know what you’d consider the national literature of America, but if the words Moby Dick are inching their way towards this conversation, whatever else it was, it was also a work of fantasy. Fantasy is kind of a plasma in which other things can be carried. I don’t think this is a ghetto. This is, fantasy is, almost a sea in which other genres swim. Now it may be that there has developed in the last couple of hundred years a subset of fantasy which merely uses a different icongraphy, and that is, if you like, the serious literature, the Booker Prize contender. Fantasy can be serious literature. Fantasy has often been serious literature. You have to fairly dense to think that Gulliver’s Travels is only a story about a guy having a real fun time among big people and little people and horses and stuff like that. What the book was about was something else. Fantasy can carry quite a serious burden, and so can humor. So what you’re saying is, strip away the trolls and the dwarves and things and put everyone into modern dress, get them to agonize a bit, mention Virginia Woolf a few times, and there! Hey! I’ve got a serious novel. But you don’t actually have to do that.

(Pauses) That was a bloody good answer, though I say it myself.

Bilbo really is such a high-quality little person, and he amazes me again and again. Gollum was ready to go back on the deal they made, that he'd show Bilbo the way out of the mountain if he won the riddle game; he was plotting to put the ring on and slay poor Bilbo instead. Bilbo, when he was in an advantageous position to slay Gollum, would do no such thing.

When he escaped, he luckily heard voices nearby and was relieved to find that everyone had escaped too. The dwarves were arguing with Gandalf, because the latter wanted them all to go back in and find Bilbo, and one of the dwarves actually said, "If we have got to go back now into those abominable tunnels to look for him, then drat him, I say." (Its probably best that we don't know which one said it.) But right before this, Bilbo had been unsure about whether they were all still inside and he had just made up his mind to go back in and rescue them - this little hobbit, all alone.

Bilbo is loyal, brave and true; he has a deep sense of honor and won't waver from it, come what may. This is what being a hero is all about.

HERE I'M RIGHT HERE

All this hype for interview with a vampire whare are my Those Who Hunt the Night girlies and guylies and theydies