We’re watching the Return of the King right now, and got to the part where Denethor is introduced.  My husband asks me for the context of why Denethor is Like That, since I just finished reading the book.  So I explained how Denethor has been using a Palantir for years to get information, and how Sauron has been manipulating him by only letting him see events that give him a worst possible impression of reality.

So my husband replies “Oh!  So Denethor is basically just like your grandpa after he starts getting all his news from Fox.”   And honestly, yeah pretty much.

So this post has blown up over the past couple of days, and while I do feel that it holds up, it also merits some elaboration based on some of the responses to it.  Like, you shouldn’t take away from this that “Sean Hannity is Sauron, lol”.  

What does ring true is the fact that propaganda truly is a powerful and insidious tool that can be very effective.

In the books, it is made clear that Denethor is a very smart, competent and strong willed leader.  Furthermore, there’s no reason to believe he was naturally inclined to be an evil man.  And he ruled Gondor from a position of relevant strength.  For many years, Sauron avoided confronting Gondor directly, as he knew he would not be able to take them down.  So he used a tactic that had served him well in the past - poisoning the mind of his opponent and weakening the country from within.  The palantir didn’t even allow him to show untrue things to Denethor or commentate to him directly - all he could do was filter what Denethor was able to see.  But that was enough.

A major theme of Lord of the Rings is how evil can triumph when good people give in to despair.  And that’s exactly what happened to Denethor.  Subtle manipulation through propaganda led him to believe that there was no hope for the future, that he couldn’t trust anyone from outside his city walls, that military might was the only strength that mattered, that scholarly pursuits were pretentious and an invitation to manipulation from outside forces, and that protecting his “legacy” was more important than trying to protect the very people whose well-being he was responsible for.  Does that sound like anyone you’ve met?

So, your only takeaway from this shouldn’t be “Fox News is evil”, (though you won’t get much argument from me).  What’s even more important to remember is that none of us is immune to this, and that we should also strive not to give into despair when we are being told the world is an awful, decaying place.  Keep hoping and make sure you get your information from multiple sources.

what they dont tell you about those little hand baskets in the grocery store is if you put enough things in them they get heavy

girl help, I have a gallon of milk in my basket

There's a great solution to this! Absolute life hack!!! (!)

You can just drink the milk to make the basket lighter again

I have been banned from Trader Joe's again.

There's a great solution to this! Absolute life hack!!! (!!)

Just wear a fake mustache to get around this.

I have been detained for impersonating a surgeon 😢

There's a great solution to this! Absolute life hack!!! (!!!)

Just impersonate a judge to overrule the detention

Too late, I have murdered everyone. 😅

There's a great solution to this! Absolute life hack!!! (!!!!)

You can just do some minor necromancy to solve this!

Help, I have unleashed the dark forces of an extradimensional reality. ☺

There's a great solution to this! Absolute life hack!!! (!!!!!)

You can just use some lemon juice to clean uo the dark forces of an extradimensional reality.

Wow! I tried this amazing life hack and it really worked!

Anyway, I gotta go to the store. Outta milk.

horrible plant ideas, go

Moss that is almost identical to common city moss, but it lets out a deadly poison into the air.

Grass that screams when you step on it

Venus dogtrap

tumbleweed with thorns

tumbleweeds already HAVE thorns

oh i thought they were made up

reindeer are also real

Great post everybody!

Get out

it fucken WIMDY (via)

Companies are no longer grounded in reality.

My roommate recently came home pale-faced, like he’d seen a ghost. More like witnessed a massacre. Mass-firings were just done at his company. His job, he’d been assured, was safe. All of his coworkers weren’t so safe, and he had to get texts and phone calls from his work-friends, people he’d worked alongside for years, people he‘d gone out to have drinks with, learn they were no longer employed. To say he had survivor’s guilt would not be hyperbole.

Was this because the company had fallen on hard times? The pandemic has been rough for a lot of industries. No, actually, the company had turned a very nice profit both last year and previous, even in such a troublesome market.

The problem was, you see, the company’s stock price hadn’t risen quite as high as had been projected. They’d made money, sure. Quite a lot of money, in fact. But too many people had projected, i.e., bet the company would do better.

How did the company offset this “loss”? Easy: fire people. Quickest and easiest way to pad the numbers.

No but you don’t understand stock had fallen a percentage point! There was no other way!

We see it all the time. Hugely successful companies reporting ‘record-breaking’ profits then fire huge segments of their workforce - the very people responsible for those record-breaking profits. Why? The money “saved” on personnel costs can boost the stocks even higher!

If your company is struggling, not turning a profit, losing money, people expect layoffs. But to work hard, be successful, your company churning along strong and healthy, and you still lose your job? For what? Because half a percentage point that was dictated by speculation, guessing, by gambling that things would go up or down a certain amount on a graph of rich-people feelings?

I wonder how next year’s speculations will be affected with the information that the company laid off a lot of the people responsible for last year’s profits? Probably not much because the workers are just the components at the company; it’s the leadership that drives the ship, that makes the successes.Those leaders whose bonuses are coincidentally decided by, among other things, the stock price.

Companies are no longer grounded in reality.

people talk all the time about “primal instincts” and it’s usually about violence or sexual temptations or something, but your humanity comes with a lot of different stuff that we do without really thinking about, that we do without being told to or prompted to

your average human comes pre-installed with instincts to:

• Befriend
• Tell story
• Make Thing
• Investigate
• Share knowledge
• Laugh
• Sing
• Dance
• Empathize with
• Create

we are chalk full of survival instincts that revolve around connecting to others (dog-shaped others, robot-shaped, sometimes even plant-shaped) and making things with our hands

your primal instincts are not bathed in blood- they are layered in people telling stories to each other around a fire over and over and putting devices together through trial and error over and over and reaching for someone and something every moment of the way

~“Your primal instincts are not bathed in blood.”

My god this is beautiful. Such a refreshing change of pace to the constant glorification of instinctual human violence.

A post about my donkey’s intelligence in relation to food

Required background knowledge:

1. Pirlouit likes when I sing to him. He has a specific way of poking my shoulder with his nose that means “Sing, human” and if I stop singing too soon for his liking he will poke and poke until I resume singing.
2. He is v good at logic when food is at stake. When my little cousins were here for Christmas they enjoyed giving the animals treats, but following their mum’s household rule of “we don’t start to eat until everyone’s sitting at the table” they wouldn’t give any treats unless all of the animals were there. Pirlouit immediately inferred “IF llamas THEN treats” and instead of trotting to us when he saw the kids and their treats, he would go in the other direction to fetch the llamas and herd them towards us, like come on guys the food distribution doesn’t start until you’re here for some reason
   

Which brings us to:

• I’ve got some leftover hay from last year, which is slightly less nutritious than this year’s fresh hay. I would like Pirlouit to be the one who eats the older hay, as he is and remains a little too plump

• I tried giving fresh hay to the llamas in one spot and old hay to the donkey in another, but it took him ten seconds to suspect that their hay was nicer than his. He proceeded to ignore his spot and go squat theirs, but he eats faster than a llama and ended up eating more fresh hay than they did (so the llamas would then go eat some old hay)
  

• New strategy: I put both fresh and old hay in the same spot (less effort). The llamas ignore the old hay and eat the fresh hay. A few metres away I distract Pirlouit by scratching his nose and singing a song to him in order to give the llamas a head start and let them eat most of the fresh hay. When the song is finished, Pirlouit can go eat; he gets some fresh hay but most of what’s left is the old hay the llamas didn’t eat.

• After a few days I realised that while Pirlouit patiently waits as I sing, he starts fidgeting when the song is about to end, knowing fully well what comes next. The second I stop singing, he turns around and dashes towards the hay.
  

• I tried to stop mid-song, to see if his logic was “When she stops singing, I can eat.” Nope. He knows this song and his understanding is “When the song is finished, I can eat.” Instead of hurrying towards the hay when I stopped in the middle of the song, he started insistently poking my shoulder in various places like I was a malfunctioning radio he couldn’t find the right button for, and his behaviour clearly spelled out Come on, finish the damn song already so I can go have lunch
  

the idea that the best Shakespeare performances are always tastefully subdued, emotionally restrained to bring out the underlying Tragedy, and best served with the Queen’s English is bullshit.

The best Shakespeare performances are always deeply bisexual and unhinged.

absolutely true

also, you cannot just leave this in the tags

thinking about that WoW epidemic

i was telling my dad, ever the skeptic, about corrupted blood back in March at the start of lockdown, and how the cdc studied it. how it can be used as a model for what to do and how people might act in the event of an unpredicted pandemic, and how people were playing out the same behavior during covid.

he said “so they fixed it, right? how did they fix it in the game?” and i told him the truth: they didn’t. they couldn’t control it. they had to reset the servers and roll them back to the time before the ZG encounter.

a CNN article recently referenced another “viral” event in world of warcraft: leeroy jenkins facepulling as a metaphor for the expedited reopening of businesses. what it fails to mention however is how the video ends. everyone who charges in with leeroy dies. he wipes the raid.

it really feels like that meme where it’s like “wow, cool video game reference!” and the point soaring over their head says THE DAMAGE WAS IRREVERSIBLE. THE THREAT SPREAD TOO RAPIDLY AND EVERYONE DIED.

weird reframing of the corrupted blood incident to make it seem, for some reason, like it was all selfish actions that people said was unrealistic because real people would help others. in fact its literally the opposite, it was used as real world data specifically because of the player driven efforts to fix it

The reason this plague in the game was a good model is because we had all walks of life type people reacting in different ways.

Those with healing magic would go into infected areas to see if they could save the infected or at least keep them alive through the disease. Those that couldn’t do that tried to warn players before they entered infected areas. NPC could be infected and have “no symptoms”; they could be asymptomatic carriers and pass it to nearby players.

The best part though was by the time Blizzard had finally come out and said “if you are infected, try to quarantine yourself so you don’t spread it!!” the player base was ALREADY DOING SO. The players had recognized the problem and worked together in myriad ways to fix it.

They also had negative reactions as well, another reason this was such a good example of a real outbreak. They had a couple people report healers or alchemists who were claiming to sell cures/treatments to the disease that ultimately would do nothing. They had a group of players that would hide in the mountains near cities and just pass the disease back and forth between themselves and then raid cities to infect them all over again. They had higher level players start rebelling on the servers. Saying it was an overreaction and if you get it you’ll just die and you can come back and be fine, etc. Since they could get the disease and survive, ie it didn’t do enough damage to them since they were higher level, they felt it unnecessary to care about whether they got it or not. They complained about not getting to play like normal just because this plague could kill lower level players.

ALL of these reactions, good and bad, were real enough to what we assumed a real life epidemic would play out that people started to use it as a model. And now look, we have proof that it was accurate.

However, what we needed to learn from it was primarily that it wasn’t reversible. The bad reactions and lack of care from the few players that weren’t cooperating made it impossible in the end to contain. The only reason it was fixed at all is the game had to reverse time, literally just delete their entire game log a few weeks and time travel weeks into the past to before the plague even began.

Think about that.

The reason no one believed it was a valid model is that it was a video game and thus the consequences weren’t permanent. “No one would act like that in real life.” But look at how we are handling this outbreak. Is it not eerily similar?

And we can’t time travel.

“They complained about not getting to play like normal just because this plague could kill lower level players.”

This is the most terrifying one. This is how the rich and healthy are acting about the poor and disabled.

#archaeologists in a historic graveyard
How dare you leave this in the comments suzy

All the weird misinterpretations and revisions of Russian history aside, Anastasia is one of my favourite movies because its plot structure is so fucking weird

It’s a period piece romance. That’s cool, that’s all well and good, except that on the sidelines there’s an undead warlock who’s trying so hard to kill the protagonist, but all in ways that the protagonist either doesn’t notice or doesn’t accept as supernatural

And it isn’t a twist! The audience knows about the warlock! The warlock has a villain song! The warlock is one of the principal characters! But the protagonist spends 95% of the movie completely unaware of the warlock, and just spends the entirety of the movie doing period piece romance things while being repeatedly inconvenienced by the warlock until the climax, when the protagonist has to very suddenly

1. Acknowledge the existence of the warlock
2. Acknowledge the existence of the supernatural
3. See some real-ass goddamn magic
4. Kill the warlock

I have never seen a movie with a plot structure like this before, and I don’t think I’ll see one like it ever again. It’s like an adaptation of Pride and Prejudice that turns Lady Catherine into a vampire who’s just repeatedly trying to drink Lizzy’s blood, but Lizzy doesn’t even notice until the climax whereupon she stuffs Lady Catherine’s mouth with garlic and cuts off her head (an adaptation I would kill to see, by the way). There are two completely different genres playing out at the same time, and one of them is trying to kill the other

Anyways that’s why the stage musical is bad, thank you and good night

The only thing I’m adding to this is that Disney’s Hercules has almost the same hero-villain dynamic in that the protagonist and antagonist think they are the heroes of two wildly different stories, and the protagonist doesn’t really know the antagonist exists until the endgame starts. It’s so fucking bizarre. They also both came out in 1997, and feature a red-headed protagonist who starts the story trying to find out who their parents are and falls in love with a shady brunette with dubious intentions who winds up trying to sacrifice themselves so the protagonist can live/be happy. I dunno what this means, but coincidence? I think NOT!

Listen that was just the vibe of 97 alright some shit went down that year

Something something two nickels.