okay this reminded me of the strongest human being (I use that label with some reservation) I have ever met and I still think about him like once a week because about 4 years ago on Thanksgiving night my sister, cousin, and I were going to pick up a friend about a 40 minute drive from home, and I got lost and tried to turn around on a little gravel pull-off on the side of the road, but my front tires got stuck in the snow.
we were in the middle of nowhere with no cell reception, and the only sign of life was a single, completely dark house across the road from us.
We all did our best to push the car out, and we’re strong people, but we couldn’t make it budge. Cold and stuck, we climbed back and wondered what to do. A car full of men pulled over beside us and asked if we needed help, but getting out of our locked car on a backroad at night with strange men felt like a bad idea, so we said a tow was coming and waved them along. We did that twice before finally deciding our only option was to accept the next offer for help and just risk it,
when a man came out of the house across the street.
He’d clearly been watching us and figured out why we’d been lying to people, which really surprised me & he said “it’s okay, you can stay in your car and keep the doors locked. Just start backing up when I say so.”
I had the window cracked and told him “it’s too stuck. There’s no way we’re getting out. Could you call a tow?”
And he said “just back up when I say so.”
So he walked around the front of the car, squatted, and said “okay back up,”
and I did, and
he lifted
the front of the car Into The Air. Off its front wheels, and we backed up while he essentially wheel-barrowed us back onto the road.
And we were honest to god yelling. We couldn’t help it. We just yelled until all four wheels were back on the ground and he was waving us off while we thanked him.
And then I looked at my sister and cousin & said “he REALLY told us we can KEEP our doors locked as if THAT WOULD’VE FUCKING STOPPED HIM!!!! As if he couldn’t have just RIPPED EM OFF THE HINGES.”
I later looked up the weight of my car, and it’s 3200 pounds without anything or anyone in it.
This haunts me.
the power of respecting women
this is the only valid response on this post
I just needed to find this post again to reminisce.
Someone PLEASE tell the Witch-King of Angmar that this little hobbit genuinely thinks it’s anyone’s guess whether or not he’s literate. PLEASE.
To be fair, it is anyone’s guess. Literacy is not some sort of baseline qualification for kingship. Even if Angmar was a realm that put great stock in the written word (and we don’t know that), that doesn’t mean every single inhabitant is literate. Literacy is a specialist skill. Kings can afford to hire (or, in the case of Angmar, enslave) specialists if they need them.
Incidentally, if the Black Riders can read, we do not know whether they can read Shire-style Westron. Maybe they just know Sauron’s adapted Black Speech Tengwar mode and a little Sindarin on the side. WHO KNOWS.
Besides, at this point Frodo doesn’t even know who and what the riders are. For all he knows, they could be trained monkeys or enchanted clouds. He doesn’t even know if they’re sapient.
Also, I’m pretty sure at one point it is mentioned that the riders use their horses to see (just don’t remember whether this is before or after the above quote).
If that is indeed the case, and is mentioned prior to this scene, it is not unreasonable to assume that the riders cannot read by virtue of not being able to see the lettering.
Now picturing a rider holding a note in front of their horse and trying to make sure it doesn’t bite it
Oh my gosh, the rabbit trail tracing going on here is delightful
It really is.
And yes, it is completely reasonable for Frodo to have no idea whether the Black Riders can see at all, read, read his language, etc., and simultaneously, I find it hilarious to imagine the Witch-King of Angmar finding out about this Doubt.
…Especially if he was literate in life but would not (for any of the available reasons) have been able to read the note.
can we explain to early-twenties autistic lgbt people that they . cant be saying these things. you cant be calling people ‘degens’ in your dni you cant do that. you cant do that man. can we do a history lesson. you cant do that
YOU CANT DO THAT MAN
“in defense of using the term degen, it’s generally applied to pedophiles” – conservative man who might actually shoot a trans woman if he saw one within 50 meters of his child, and also LGBT tumblr users who do not know things they should know
“Degeneracy” is a fascist concept. There is no defending that word, just stop using it
to be extra clear. the reason it is fascist is because it implies a) an ideal past that society has fallen from, and b) people who are responsible for society’s fall from that ideal past.
a “degenerate” is someone who caused/causes society to fall from that ideal past.
even applying the term “degenerate” to people who have actually sexually abused children, specifically, is still implying that there was once a world in which CSA did not exist, which society must return to, and which Certain Types Of People have caused society to stray from in the first place.
these problems are systemic. that’s like the whole idea behind all progressive and leftist ideology. come on.
It’s also fascist because the implication is that certain genes are what causes this decline. That can mean “anyone who has any disability should be sterilized, because having disabled people makes society weak” or “we think poverty is genetic, so poor people should be sterilized and then we’ll only have wealthy people,” but it can also mean “racial intermixing inherently leads to genetic problems in the population that leads to crime and disorder, and this mixing is facilitated by evil people who want society to fall (and those people are Jews).”
So like, it’s not just “there was a mythical time when there was no CSA and certain people ruined it,” but also the unspoken “the thing that ruined it is The Wrong People having too much freedom to pass on their wrong genes (and it’s the Jews’ fault).”
October 14, 2022 – Alex stopped to help save a gunshot victim from bleeding out, he was then given Saint Paul Police Chiefs Award for Valor. He then gave this small speech.
“I feel like I did what anyone would have done with a little bit of
training that they have, that I have. I’m a certified firearms
instructor, work in a high school in Minneapolis, dad and husband, and a
wonderful community member.
That day, nine of your squad cars raced
past us as I was flagging them down (was said in the letter you sent
me), and that was a potential of 18 people. 18 people could have stopped
to preserve life, but 18 people chose to go to a potential threat, and I
recognize the man had a pistol and we didn’t know what he was doing. I
do appreciate the recognition.
I won’t keep this stuff. This will go to
my mom, this will probably go to my son because I am very uncomfortable
being here with you guys. I do not rock with the police, but I do
appreciate you giving me the opportunity to say these things. I just
want folks to know they don’t keep us safe. We keep us safe. Riots work.
Thank you.”
October 14, 2022 – Alex stopped to help save a gunshot victim from bleeding out, he was then given Saint Paul Police Chiefs Award for Valor. He then gave this small speech.
“I feel like I did what anyone would have done with a little bit of
training that they have, that I have. I’m a certified firearms
instructor, work in a high school in Minneapolis, dad and husband, and a
wonderful community member.
That day, nine of your squad cars raced
past us as I was flagging them down (was said in the letter you sent
me), and that was a potential of 18 people. 18 people could have stopped
to preserve life, but 18 people chose to go to a potential threat, and I
recognize the man had a pistol and we didn’t know what he was doing. I
do appreciate the recognition.
I won’t keep this stuff. This will go to
my mom, this will probably go to my son because I am very uncomfortable
being here with you guys. I do not rock with the police, but I do
appreciate you giving me the opportunity to say these things. I just
want folks to know they don’t keep us safe. We keep us safe. Riots work.
Thank you.”
The Princess Bride is such a funny book to read after ONLY seeing the movie. Like Goldman made up a fake author from a fake country and proceeded to write the book as an abridged version of what the fake author wrote… and then he proceeds to add in notes to the “abridged version” mentioning all the boring world building stuff he skipped because it was boring.
Like shout out to William Goldman, man really did make an entire book that is just “the cool scenes you thought of in your head” and then made up a fake author to abridge so he doesn’t have to connect them.
And it slaps
I used to work at a used bookstore, and had a group of three teenage boys come in wanting the “Unabridged Version” of Princess Bride.
They would not believe that it was a narrative device and the unabridged version didn’t exist. Said no author would credit someone else for their own writing, that was ridiculous, and was there a guy who knew about fantasy they could talk to?
I grabbed a coworker and left him to deal with it. Heard him explaining the concept of a pen name as I walked away.
the unabridged princess bride 🤝goncharov
fictitious works of media that sound very interesting but can never exist in a way that lives up to the expectations built by their nonexistence
I love it when modern adaptations of old books opt to be loyal to the book’s cultural context instead of the specific details of the characters/settings. Like if one character written in a specific era is depicted as being annoyingly obsessed with pocket watches, specifically as a way of illustrating that this man is a fashion-obsessed airheaded fop, it wouldn’t make sense in the same way in the 21st century, pocket watches would be an extremely odd and interesting hobby for a modern young man, so it doesn’t have the same context. Make that mf a sneakerhead.
Or a specific scene that’s constantly used as an example for arguments of “I don’t like [the book heroine] because she hates horses”, when originally the point of the scene was that all this talk about horse breeds and some specific stud’s ankle angles is also going over her head, and it’s more of a “send help, car guys won’t stop talking about cars” situation.
In a modern adaptation of Agatha Christie’s Poirot, Arthur Hastings is a man who bought a cybertruck and Miss Lemon is an unhinged Wikipedia editor and Ao3 tag wrangler.
amhrancas 