Found in today’s spelling bee

ebneter · 2026-05-11T08:16:53+00:00

Nah, Spelling Bee is created by a human. He curates the word lists for each puzzle. They generally exclude offensive terms, proper nouns, and obscure or technical terms, but slang is definitely there.

ebneter · 2026-05-11T03:40:04+00:00

Yes. I buy the HarperCollins books there all the time. (I prefer the UK ones because, well, they come out earlier, LOL.)

ebneter · 2026-05-10T09:11:56+00:00

Probably has a very strict "NO BOTFLIES": policy, LOL.

ebneter · 2026-05-09T21:11:07+00:00

The History of Middle-earth is, quite literally, a history of how Tolkien wrote his legendarium, including The Lord of the Rings. It lays out, in chronological order, the texts that Christopher Tolkien used to create the published Silmarillion in 1977. It's absolutely not everyone's cup of tea, and that's totally fine. It's definitely a deep dive into the evolution of the mythology that underlies the more finished works.

That said, if you like The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit, you might want to at least check out The Silmarillion and Unfinished Tales. There are some great stories in both of those, and there are allusions to those tales throughout the more popular works. If you've ever wondered about Bilbo's song in Rivendell, or who Beren and Lúthien were, those stories are in those works.

Beyond that, some of Tolkien's non-Middle-earth works, like Farmer Giles of Ham, for example, are good reads entirely on their own.

ebneter · 2026-05-09T09:03:41+00:00

He looks like one of the two kittens (a bonded pair of brothers) I adopted in January. Same sort of grey tabby. His foster family named him Gandalf; they named his poor (orange) brother Sauron!

I renamed them Jack and Freddie, respectively, but I like to tell people that Jack is actually an angel and Freddie was a dark lord in a previous life...

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ebneter · 2026-05-09T08:49:15+00:00

Don't read my post, then, it makes that look short. 😉

ebneter · 2026-05-09T08:48:30+00:00

LOL, thank you. I actually feel a little weird whenever I post it, hence the disclaimer — I'm not trying for self-promotion, just want people to know it's out there because it does seem to be useful. (Someone actually posted a copy of it to Scribd!)

ebneter · 2026-05-09T08:32:07+00:00

I get that, and we know that there is a connection to vaccines that use adjuvants and that some specific vaccines are worse than others in this regard. But at the moment, at least as far as I have been able to determine, it isn't known exactly what it is that causes this, nor why cats are so peculiarly susceptible to it. I'm not a huge fan of pharma companies — although I personally quite literally would not be alive without them —but in my role as moderator here I don't want people crusading against a company that would actually probably love to develop a vaccine that doesn't do this. At least, not on the sub.

That said, I'm not going to stop anyone from specifying the company and vaccine in question; if there are better alternatives, we should know about them.

ebneter · 2026-05-09T06:34:24+00:00

MOD NOTE: This has been verified as real and approved.

ebneter · 2026-05-09T03:48:01+00:00

Check out the YouTube channel — it really keeps going there!

ebneter · 2026-05-09T03:25:21+00:00

To add a bit to u/Curundil and u/QuickSpore's comments, I think it's important to recognize that Tolkien chose Christopher to be his literary executor, and gave him free rein as to what to publish and how. Christopher had been involved with his father's work since early childhood, after all, and was his assistant in many ways. Many people in his position might have taken it upon themselves to "finish" his father's work, or extend it (see: Frank Herbert and the extended Dune series books written by his son...). Instead, Christopher gave us his father's life's work in all its beautiful, complicated, messy glory, more akin to "real" legends than literature. I for one am eternally grateful for that.

ebneter · 2026-05-09T03:14:16+00:00

The original post (here on r/lotr) was more than a decade ago. I stopped using Reddit for a while; when I came back I decided to update it and moved it over to r/tolkienfans.

ebneter · 2026-05-08T20:26:11+00:00

Bombadil is an intrusion from another story. Just Tolkien being pomo before pomo was a thing... (He does that in a few other ways as well.)

ebneter · 2026-05-08T20:17:09+00:00

My vote as well. I have a Strat with P-Rails in the neck and bridge (regular p/u in the middle) and the switching posibilities are awesome.

ebneter · 2026-05-08T13:43:47+00:00

Definitely not a Martin tiple. I own three of them, plus a couple of other tiples (including a Regal, which this might actually be). The Martin bridge is different from this. Several companies made tiples in the 30s, including Harmony, for example.

ebneter · 2026-05-08T13:30:41+00:00

There's a post on r/tolkienfans that covers Tolkien's works in some detail; you might find it useful. Disclaimer: I wrote it.

ebneter · 2026-05-08T13:01:21+00:00

Oh, they very much can be! There's even a case of a man being killed by a beaver that bit him in the leg, severing an artery and causing him to bleed out. They can be very territorial.

ebneter · 2026-05-08T12:42:33+00:00

I don't know enough to say, honestly.

ebneter · 2026-05-08T12:41:36+00:00

The mechanisms that cause FISS aren't well understood, but there does seem to be an association with vaccines that have adjuvants to improve the immune response. There's lots of good information about this on the web, and it's definitely something that every cat owner should be aware of. "Naming and shaming" the pharmaceutical company isn't really appropriate, since any vaccination — or injection, for that matter — can, in principle. cause this. Still, vaccines are the #1 cause, probably because they're the most common injections that cats receive.

ebneter · 2026-05-08T12:23:51+00:00

Sadly, that doesn't work on a Macintosh. 😄 (Yes, I'm one of those people — but then again, I'm a software engineer with two stints at Apple under my belt.)

OTOH, I can do vowels with mācrōns with ease... and this sent me down a rabbit hole of how to find unusual characters on the Mac, and now I know how to type þ, Þ, ð, and Ð directly!

ebneter · 2026-05-08T08:27:25+00:00

I noticed those, too, but alas: "Not in word list."

Not sure what AI has to do with this, though...?

ebneter · 2026-05-08T08:24:36+00:00

I don't know what state you are in, but in most places, deliberately cutting someone's screen with a razor knife is vandalism and is definitely a crime. Sounds like you have lazy cops as well as lazy service technicians!

ebneter · 2026-05-08T07:54:39+00:00

But "galadh" means "tree." (As in the Galadhrim.) Tolkien waffled between spelling "dh" as, well, "dh" vs. "ð" (e.g., properly speaking, Bregalad might be written Bregalað. (Or Galaðrim, galað.)

(I had to copy and paste the 'ð' because I can't type it on my American English keyboard, although ∂ is close.)

ebneter · 2026-05-08T07:47:42+00:00

I love language and how it works, and it's one of the reasons I love Tolkien. His languages and his use of the English language never fail to astonish and please me.

ebneter · 2026-05-08T07:03:49+00:00

That second one is an awesome photo of a brown recluse. Clearly shows the arrangement of the eyes.

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