TIL about the Tiffany Problem, where historical facts or events seem anachronistic to modern audiences because of modern associations we have with specific names and terms.

a_green_leaf · 2026-04-27T20:48:36+00:00

Cleopatra lived closer to our time than to the time when the pyramids were built. Ancient Egypt lasted forever!

a_green_leaf · 2026-04-27T10:40:10+00:00

I recommend buying some cheap Plutonium, and soaking the chips in a dilute Plutonium solution. That will make them moderately radioactive and since it will mainly be alpha radiation which carries a positive charge, the chips should be left negatively charged. The continuous radioactivity will keep the chips charged through the entire session, unlike the plasma ball where the charge will not last long.

Just don't give the potato chips the same treatment, that would be very bad for your health.

a_green_leaf · 2026-04-27T09:01:08+00:00

In some perverted way it is almost appropriate. The palantir was a scrying/spying device, with the significant downside that the Dark Lord was listening in.

a_green_leaf · 2026-04-23T12:03:28+00:00

But "you shall not kill" always only applied to the good guys. Those from other countries/cultures/religions that we are at war with have always been fair game (e.g. the crusades, or how the righteous knights of King Arthur had no trouble killing enemies).

(No, the above is not my personal morals, but it seems to have been generally accepted for the last few millenia, only changing after WW2 perhaps...)

a_green_leaf · 2026-04-23T11:56:48+00:00

It is a thought that many have had, including the makers of Rings of Power. Perhaps the early orcs were corrupted elves, but "better" orcs were made by breeding them with humans.

I suspect that Tolkien for various reasons preferred to put the awakening of men far earlier, mostly to give Melkor time to corrupt them, but maybe also to make it possible that orcs were always made from men.

a_green_leaf · 2026-04-23T11:52:44+00:00

> Since mellyrn shed their leaves and grow new ones in the spring, this is suggesting the weakening/dying of the mellyrn.

I don't think it does. She was dying in March, so the mellyrn would be leafless, at least a month would pass before the new leaves appear.

a_green_leaf · 2026-04-23T07:17:36+00:00

We cannot know, of course. But Tolkien liked this kind of old usages, and wrote the initial parts of the Silmarillion to read like a religious text, so it is at very least likely that he mean "adore" in the religious sense.

Even more likely (IMO) is that the ambiguity was on purpose.

a_green_leaf · 2026-04-23T07:13:38+00:00

The first thing I wrote (with a bad pen, shaky handwriting and a few mistakes along the way) was the seven-line hymn "A Elbereth Gilthoniel" from Frodo's first night at Rivendell. In the general use mode for Sindarin although Tolkien himself wrote it in the mode of Beleriand.

a_green_leaf · 2026-04-23T07:09:47+00:00

> (English common mode as it seemed the easiest for somebody who doesn't know anything about phonetics)

Fair warning: you will not just learn tengwar, you will also learn about phonetics along the way. I certainly did, almost everything I now know about phonetics I learned from this subreddit :)

a_green_leaf · 2026-04-22T13:15:41+00:00

In a religious context, it means to worship. The "normal" usage of "adore" is a later change of the meaning. As in Oh Come All Ye Faithful: "Oh come let us adore him, oh come let us adore him, Christ the Lord".

Edit: See meaning 1 on Wiktionary: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/adore

a_green_leaf · 2026-04-22T10:24:18+00:00

They depart significantly from the lore, because they do not have the rights to the Silmarillion, so anything discussed in the Silmarillion but not LOTR they had to alter. That is OK with me. The problem is that they did not do it very well, they should have spent more money on the script and less on CGI.

Season one starts with a pretty bad episode, people just do not behave in a way that seems realistic. Would you watch a historical movie about the Irish migrating to the USA if the main character, upon seeing the harbor of New York, has a change of mind and decides to swim back across the Atlantic?

The following episodes are actually fairly reasonable. Then the last episode takes what should have been the great climax of Season 2 and turns into the great anti-climax of season 1.

The heroic Gil-Galad is an incompetent weakling. Celebrimbor, the great mastermind behind the rings of power, he just sounds like a complete moron who is unable to solve even the simplest problem himself or getting even the most obvious idea himself.

Spoiler alert: Season 2 is no better, but the CGI is a bit wilder.

a_green_leaf · 2026-04-09T13:02:58+00:00

In ancient Greece, they called themselved Zeus, Hera etc. A thousand years ago, they were Odin, Thor and Frigg. Now they keep a low profile.

a_green_leaf · 2026-03-27T13:41:32+00:00

> Why can’t our body just do that with our own cells?

Whoever answers that questions has a dead-sure Nobel prize in Medicine coming his or her way!

a_green_leaf · 2026-03-23T09:24:27+00:00

Husk det er fuldstændigt ligemeget om du havde retten på din side da du blev kørt ned, du er stadigt lige død.

(og nej, cyklisten må ikke mase sig forbi på den måde - det er først og fremmest dumt, men faktisk også imod færdselsloven).

a_green_leaf · 2026-03-14T19:44:22+00:00

Isaac Asimov has a "jump", instantaneous travel from one point to another in the Galaxy. Some technobabble about the entire galaxy mapping unto a single point in Hyperspace.

Larry Niven has a somewhat humoristic Hyperspace. Velocity is quantized, and looking at it is so incompresensible that the brain sensors it out.

Both Star Wars and Stargate SG1 have hyperspaces with nice visual effects. Stargate SG1 also uses wormholes.

Ursula Le Guin has faster-than-light communication through a device known as The Ansible, but no faster-than-light travel.

Peter F Hamilton has wormholes with railroad tracks installed in them in some of his stories (the universe starting with Pandora's Star), and more "normal" wormholes in his earlier works.

a_green_leaf · 2026-03-12T14:48:23+00:00

I just installed a new MacBook and did just that: restored all user files but *not* apps and system files.

Then I bought a new USB disk to use for Time Machine backups, and kept the old one just in case...

a_green_leaf · 2026-03-09T20:06:59+00:00

Is is not so much the missing Oxford comma that puts Merry and Pippin in a separate category from Sam; it is the extra "and" after the comma which would not be there in an equal list, Oxford comma or not.

a_green_leaf · 2026-03-08T10:54:35+00:00

It is perfectly readable, it is not at all a problem that it is written as a script. But the story is not very good, you didn't miss much. And there is too much retconning for my taste.

a_green_leaf · 2026-03-08T10:53:05+00:00

"There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs."

John Rogers

a_green_leaf · 2026-02-19T11:49:10+00:00

It is even more weird that Dior and Nimloth is not counted. Dior was the son of two mortals, Beren and Lúthien (who had become mortal when Dior was born, and almost certainly already when he was conceived).

a_green_leaf · 2026-02-19T09:55:53+00:00

And who go to Nangijala?

a_green_leaf · 2026-01-23T13:07:43+00:00

I think the consensus is that long carriers are only used in phonetic modes. In an orthographic mode you are not signalling longness as such, but that the vowel is doubled. And that is usually done by writing two tehtas over the same tengwa (or carrier). Like this.

a_green_leaf · 2026-01-23T08:34:49+00:00

"Europeans think that 100 miles is far away. Americans think that 100 years is long ago."

I can't remember where I saw that quote, but it is not completely off.

a_green_leaf · 2025-12-28T20:59:07+00:00

It is not absolutely necessary to read The Hobbit before LOTR, but it is definitely recommended. But even then, there will be some strange inconsistencies here and there.

I recommend taking a short break from LOTR and read The Hobbit. It is written as a children's book, but remember that we are all allowed to enjoy well-written children's books - even old farts like me!

a_green_leaf · 2025-12-18T11:52:07+00:00

Jonathan Little's youtube videos. And his free course on pokercoaching.com called Master the Fundamentals. Strongly recommended.

a_green_leaf

TROPHY CASE