having a job is very weird bcos by and large your coworkers will be a variety of ages and you will not all be at the same stage of life. your coworker will be like, well I’m off home to spend time with my husband & child, what are you going to do with your evening? and you’re like, well, I plan on playing Rollercoaster Tycoon for as much as it as possible

The biggest reason 9/11 did not happen in brazil is because big jesus would have catched the plane and destroy the terorist. Second big reason is tjat world trade center wads not i nbrasil

annoys me that people are still doing the 'mangione was innocent' willful ignorance but i also hope that he gets off because it would be funny

christmas is kind of like if for 1/6 of the year everyone got really into ska and started wearing the fedoras and checkered clothing and they only played ska music in stores that the employees clearly weren't enjoying and everything was just ska themed for a while and one day someone eagerly asks you what ska you're listening to and when you tell them you're not doing the whole ska thing for the tenth time in a row its like a 50/50 chance that their face suddenly falls deathly serious and they say "are you one of those people who thinks all orphans should be drowned in boiling shit?" or they chuckle and squint at you and say "oh yeah you must be one of those people that listens to pop punk! Its kinda like a weird, different ska I guess! I am going to a ska concert later today if you wanna come along and see how awesome ska is, as enforced by the ephemeral force of enjoying ska instilled in all moral beings!" and this has been going on for so long that all the ska music is just people saying "pick it up" over and over again and plastering everything in checker patterns and theres a whole wave of people who think everyone has forgotten how to really enjoy ska but they actually just want an older version of the artificially enforced ska mania everyone is having and they made a book and several movies called "the man who did not like ska" about a disgusting evil spinach creature that hated everything and ate broken glass every day who learns basic empathy after hearing an upstrummed guitar for the first time.

are you lost little boy

This is so much funnier than my caption, dammit

whenever someone says "blorbo from my shows" i picture ryou bakura. not in the sense that he's my blorbo but in that in my mind he sort of abstractly represents the concept of a blorbo. he could be blorbo from anyone's shows. he's the blorbo class representative, a stand-in for all blorbos from all shows. sort of the platonic ideal of a blorbo

This little Muffin, for context:

-And I agree, Ryou Bakura is like the holotype specimen of Blorbos. He's got all the features: 1. Absolutely impenetrable lore to anyone not familiar with the series:

2. Tagged in shit that makes absolutely no sense:

3. Very Shaped:

Truly, a perfect example of the clade.

turning over the question of the silm unreliable narrator and the thing is for a text to have an unreliable narrator, it has to have internal contradictions or improbabilities that signpost its unreliability to us. one of the few places that this happens is in the leithian tale. the narrative very much illustrates to us how much of the heavy lifting luthien is doing in freeing beren from tol sirion, getting them into angband, putting morgoth to sleep and then getting out.

however, when this passage is narrativised later, at the start of the final chapter on earendil & the war of wrath, this is how it is told: "...which Beren had won and Lúthien had worn...".

in other words, luthien is reduced to a passive actor. someone who bears the jewel, but is erased from having played a substantial part in actually, actively winning it from morgoth. we actively do see a sexist bias playing out, in reaffirming the men transform the world, women give birth ("for the nissi the making of things new is for the most part shown in the forming of their children, so that invention and change is otherwise mostly brought about by the neri", LaCE).

given the direct contradictions in the description of how the silmaril was won in the beren & luthien chapter, we can point to this one instance of unreliability.

I've been thinking (read: monologuing at my husband over lunch) about the question of the Silmarillion's potential unreliable narrator lately as well, and I agree that it just doesn't bear the hallmarks of having one. Simply stating that Pengolodh is from Gondolin and therefore must be biased (the argument I usually see) isn't enough. What does Tolkien aim to show us about his world by using an unreliable narrator, and how is that evident in the text?

To me, it's not really that evident? There appears to be no differentiation between the narrator's voice and Tolkien's voice; I've read a bunch of Tolkien's letters and a lot of the notes in NoME or PoME, and while Tolkien re-considers issues as his work progresses which leads to occasional inconsistent characterization (e.g. the question of the Valar's fallibility and their changing role within the legendarium), he never seems to treat these questions as anything other than the objective truth of his world, and the conclusions he reaches are not altered by being included in this in-world history. There is no tension between what Tolkien sees as his world (keeping in mind his biases) and what the narrator tells us, if that makes sense.

There is nothing really internally inconsistent within the Silm itself, as you noted, and therefore, nothing revealed to us through the use of internal inconsistency. I mean! "Unreliable narrator" is a deliberate authorial choice that informs the interpretation of the whole story! There is a reason Faulkner's “Absalom, Absalom” has multiple narrators who obfuscate, change, question, and re-interpret the story of the rise and fall of the Sutpen family; in so doing, they make us question our understanding of the events as they took place as well. Questioning the retelling of the myth leads to questioning the entire structure underpinning the narrators' world; a critique of the American South told through the narrators' inconsistencies. There is nothing to reinterpret for the Silm; there is nothing revealed to us about the world, no underlying story, no deliberately missing or obscured facts hiding some unsavory overarching truth that I can see.

Wait an addendum - I think sometimes people may be mistaking unreliable narration in novels with an author mimicking actual lying/propaganda in written historical narratives? Thinking Suetonius or Giorgio Vasari here, embellishing to make current political patrons look good and their rivals horrible little gremlins in comparison. They aren't the same thing, although they may have similar presentations. I still don't buy it for the Silm as the narrator is just not that developed as an authorial voice separate from Tolkien and Tolkien didn't work on any other material that would suggest the narrator is deliberately lying. I mean, for historic work we can look to other contemporaneous documentation to see what we can corroborate or question, but we don't have anything like that created for the silm. There is nothing we can point to to say, for example, "Ah ha! Pengolodh was lying! Turgon is of merely average height!"and have that inform our interpretation of the story. Anyway it is 3am where I live and I have lost the thread.

Lol I was writing up a similar post to this effect and this is a much more simplified version of what I was trying to say, ty! With the only addition that I can't actually tell what the difference between a biased and unreliable narrator is, except that we're supposed to take the historian as biased bc all historians are biased - true, but then in order to perform historiography, we have to have other materials to hand to arrive at another interpretation of facts. And well. We don't have that. Because this is Tolkien's world. And he invented everything. (And was notoriously incredibly possessive about how it was interpreted, from both major to incredibly minor questions like character appearances). And also there is a lot of opportunism in the fandom in how a biased narrator is used to actually suggest unreliability in a way that would not actually work if we were to be serious abt the historiographic approach.

Sorry for the late reply, I basically posted the last one and then got on an 8 hour flight with my 2 year old and may never recover lol. I'm glad my post was useful! To try and clarify (I think I muddied the waters a bit in my last paragraph), I honestly don’t think there really is a difference between an unreliable narrator and a biased narrator in fiction, because any of the evidence we'd have for a biased narrator just does not exist in a fictional world. But I have sometimes seen the idea of a “biased narrator” used to indict Pengolodh* the same way it is used against actual historical narrative. And I specifically don’t like the idea of painting the Silm's narrator as a biased narrator in the vein of, for example, Vasari (notorious for being the Number One Florentine Partisan when it comes to Renaissance art history) where we can look at the work as a whole and assume a general bias based on historical facts at the time (Vasari was part of the Florentine court and worked for the ruling Medici family; these are real people and places that existed and had real purpose behind their self-hagiography, and we do have contemporaneous contradictory accounts, etc) because, without any of the things that we use to corroborate/question events in a real-world history, what we end up with is just a narrative that is untrustworthy in its entirety. And then what is even the point of writing or reading or discussing that.

*I am using Pengolodh but I don’t think that’s entirely accurate to the published Silm. I know he was supposed to be responsible for the Annals of Beleriand and a few other pieces, and then some of the other parts of what ended up being the Silm were narrated by other people. And all of this was bridged together by Christopher Tolkien and Guy Kay, so it makes it really hard to say that there is a coherent underlying bias** that belongs to the in-world narrator that was part of the original story Tolkien wanted to write.

**besides Tolkien’s authorial biases; those manage to shine through! His own little silmarils. Although in this case, it turns out silima is just religion and empire

(Although I guess if we were to be serious about the historiographic approach, there is also a genre? subgenre? of unreliable narrators that attempt to recreate a fictional world with a biased narrator who is aware of an audience, for e.g. Nabokov’s Pale Fire, or more directly, Danielewski's House of Leaves, or GRRM’s Fire and Blood (full disclosure, haven't read that one, am just aware of its framing device as an in-world history told by an in-world biased narrator) that kind of invite it. But any evidence we use to determine those narrators' biases and lies is part of the novel, and there is an underlying reason, an authorial choice, for the resulting untrustworthiness of the text, which we don't have for the Silm or any other part of the legendarium, so I feel like it's hardly worth mentioning.)

I don't actually have anything substantial to add to your comment (save to commiserate re. the flight, because that sounds like it would have been extraordinarily exhausting) - except that I actually started thinking about this because I was rereading I, Claudius and I got to thinking about how I, Claudius is a nakedly, obviously biased history told by a very obviously biased historian who is constantly revealing his biases to us (though its told in first person, like Pale Fire). There's obvs a stark difference between how a text like I, Claudius is framed versus the Quenta Silmarillion.

TBH, even within Tolkien's texts, there is very much a difference between essays like Note on the Language of the Valar or Osanwe-kenta (Pengolodh) and how the information is presented there - including with the sort of internal rhetorical flourishes that I see appearing in I, Claudius (albeit thru the third person omniscient lens; what Claudius states out loud is presented as "Pengolodh says" or "Pengolodh writes" in places before, as in Osanwe-kenta launching into full-throated rhetorical argument with an imaginary opponent) - and the texts that constitute the Quenta Silmarillion (annals of Beleriand, the Grey Annals etc, which do have different focal points, but are narrated dryly & then pulled together, as you say, by Christopher Tolkien & GGK). Its an interesting differentiation, which also maybe points towards a bit of how Tolkien was thinking of the narrative?

Anyway, I also do think there's a misuse of the term unreliable narrator happening At Large, because like, an unreliable narrator does not actually prove that the things in canon didn't happen the way they do. Very famously, we do have to believe e.g. events did happen the way they did in The Great Gatsby, even if we do interrogate how Nick writes/thinks about Gatsby. Pale Fire explicitly forces us to interrogate whether or not events actually happened because that's how Nabokov frames the narrative... Authorial intent does matter a little bit there* in readerly interpretation. So even if the Silm could demonstrably said to have been written by an unreliable narrator (not likely, as you've pointed out) we'd still have to figure out whether the unreliability lies in the sequence events, or if it lies in how events are construed/intepreted/historicised, or specifically how specific people are depicted. Otherwise, like you say, we just end up junking the narrative as untrustworthy in its entirety - and what is the point in that?

*I feel really odd bringing up authorial intent, because I'm not usually interested in authorial intent in "readings", but at the same time I do think there is some baseline sense of... well this is what the work is trying to achieve that is maybe integral to the act of analysis and also reading?

Thinking about that one Wendy Carlos video where she's boymoding and has the big fake glued on sideburns and the suit, but with beautifully shaped eyebrows and that t-girl voice, and shes completely and utterly unconvincing trying to pass as a man, but also shes just so excitedly infodumping about moog synthesizers and batting her eyelashes its hard not to fall in love with her.

This was one of Wendy's last television appearances for a very long time. She came out publicly nine years later in an interview with Playboy magazine and talked about how miserable she was at this point in her life. She'd released Switched-On Bach as Walter Carlos in October of 1968, less than a year after she'd begun HRT, when the physical changes were becoming more noticeable.  Wendy had been living as a woman in her private and social life, but the public appearances and interviews she had to do in the wake of its commercial success and critical acclaim were a source of profound anxiety and dysphoria.  Wendy used to cry in her hotel room as she applied the press-on sideburns, put on a wig to hide her long hair, and used an eyeliner to fake a five-o' clock shadow before going on television shows (and before her meeting with Stanley Kubrick to compose the soundtrack to A Clockwork Orange); few people bothered to hide their speculation and open disgust.

Over the next decade, she continued with the treatments and was able to afford gender affirming surgeries but released two more albums as “Walter”—fears for her safety and pressure from her record label made it unthinkable to do otherwise. That’s ten years of both public and creative isolation in a field she pioneered:

This is Wendy Carlos almost twenty years later.  She was always beautiful, but right here? She’s fucking luminous.

It's really hard to get ahold of these days, but if you can find a copy of Secrets of Synthesis, I highly recommend it. We go over it a little bit in this episode of the radio show from 2019, but YouTube flagged it before it even went live, so it's just on dublab.

Turns out, she kind of hates modular synthesizers, the thing she's most well known for.

she’s still with us and she maintains her own website, for those who didn’t know

And here’s a quote from her I always think about.

I love the old school bbc framing of these videos too with the BWAA and the DiNk DINk DINK noises (Wendy, soothingly, making 1980s BBC noise that sounds relatively unlike a xylophone: “this is VERY close to being an xylophone”) the content is pretty great

Bigger Luke Theory is the perfect satire of "fan theories" existing divorced from textual analysis because it uses all the tools of treating the fiction at face value as a real thing that happened, to reach a conclusion that makes absolutely no fucking sense in any interpretation of the story

It bothers me so much that the healthcare system relies so much on the patient's ability to advocate for themselves, organize their history, and be so persistent against every medical “professional” who says there’s nothing wrong/they can do. But so many struggle with fatigue, brain fog, and face such ingrained systemic barriers, that the people who need and deserve help and support can’t access it.

I saw something recently that resonated with me: “Access shouldn't depend on who has the energy to fight for it.” And I’ve never agreed with anything more.

people who are obsessed with IQ would buckle if there was a number associated with how pleasant you are to interact with

This wouldn't be too hard to make, honestly.

We have IQ, intelligence Quotient, why not CQ, Charisma Quotient?

Every human on earth has six essential attributes or abilities which influence their characteristics, such as how likely they are to catch a disease, or the difficulty of saving against their spells. I discussed this with @memecucker once, but to summarise:

IQ is an ordinal (I.E, adjusted for populations so the average remains the same) measure of the INT score.

In score of 10 equates to IQ of 100, average intelligence. 9 to 90, 12 to 120, etc.

You could, in principle, do the same for Charisma.

?

Holy shit queen

we need more pathetic female characters written by authors who don't hate women

to be clear since this is making the rounds: she has to be an absolute loser in no way that can be pinned on her gender. no "i'm just a girl tee-hee" stuff. straight up just a loser (nondenominational)

addendum: she must be the most important person in the whole narrative

I decided to sit down and concentrate and properly write the list of rules that qualify a character for this role.