So (according to the concept art book) as the Fellowship travels deeper into Middle Earth, the places they pass through become inspired by progressively older periods of history. The farther along you are in the story, the more ancient the design influences
We begin in The Shire: which feels so familiar because, with its tea-kettles and cozy fireplaces, it’s inspired by the relatively recent era of rural England in the 1800s
But when we leave Hobbiton, we also leave that familiar 1800s-England aesthetic behind and start going farther back in time.
Bree is based on late 1600s English architecture
Rohan is even farther back, based on old anglo-saxon era architecture (400s-700s? ce)
Gondor is way back, and no longer the familiar English or Anglo-Saxon: its design comes from classical Greek and Roman architecture
And far far FAR back is Mordor. It’s a land of tents and huts: prehistoric, primitive, primeval. Cavemen times
And the heart of Mordor is a barren lifeless hellscape of volcanic rock…like a relic from the ages when the world was still being formed, and life didn’t yet exist
And then they finally reach Mount Doom, which one artist described as
“where the ring was made, which represents, in a sense, the moment of creation itself”
I keep seeing people asking ‘is solarpunk really punk?’ because it’s too happy and optimistic and stuff
and I’m picturing a perfect moment in a solarpunk community — the neighbourhood mayor standing with a shit-eating grin on her face when the cops come and cut them off from city power, and nothing turns off
This is my absolute favorite example of how solarpunk is punk. Also, Detroit (and a lot of other places) could probably use something similar for water. Especially in places where it’s illegal to harvest rainwater. I dunno, maybe water tanks cleverly designed as yard art?
Like… yeah it’s happy and optimistic, but my view of solarpunk at least is in complete defiance of many capitalist ideals so if that’s not punk … ‘Punk’ isn’t edgy, dark and gritty. Not to me. Building a society completely based on renewable resources, accessibility for all, and constant sharing is a big fuck you to the current system if you ask me.
Exactly. Near future solarpunk especially requires rebelling against the
current system. Punk is about defiance (at least that’s what it’s come to mean colloquially). Defiance doesn’t have to be
destruction and violence and grit, it can look like stubborn creation and
community building and rejecting many of the dominant system’s values.
Wait. Why would harvesting rainwater be illegal?
There’s an interpretation of the concept of property that says if something has value, then someone should be getting paid for it. Despite being flatly absurd and riddled with obvious logical flaws, this has been one of the major philosophies of property in the US, in some contexts (including water) for over a hundred years. This Washington Post article gets into it in detail.
According to this logic, if there are water suppliers in a region, then they’re entitled to money when people get water. Collecting rainwater for yourself gets around that, so, in this concept of property, it’s a form of theft.
There have also been legal battles over people growing food in their lawns, generating their own electricity, etc. If you’re looking to extricate yourself from the systems wherein you have to serve the interests of specific wealthy people to survive, many parts of the western world are ready to use the force of government intervention to stop you.
I feel like a big chunk of the ‘dark, gritty’ aesthetic punk is associated with came as a reaction to the bright, glamorous ‘American Dream’ imagery and patronizing ad campaigns of the 50s.
But now that we’re being sold “The future is bleak and dirty and there’s nothing you can do about it,” being optimistic and cheerful is the most punk and rebellious thing you can do
Basically, just because something is bright and cheerful and hopeful, it doesn’t mean it’s not disruptive and challenging status quo/authority.
I like solarpunk because it takes the hope in all punk movements - you know, the thing that makes you think that standing up and doing something different will actually work out - and puts it right front and center of everything.
THIIIIIIS.
The system is designed to keep you in the consumption cycle.
Disrupt the cycle! Build solar systems, grow your own tomatoes, be kind to your neighbors and your enemies alike! We are capable of all the kindness in the world. Why not use it as rebellion?
Also I just like stained glass-and-gardens asthetic.
It is tempting to forget the morning rituals, when you inspected your body for lesions that might have appeared during the night and signal that it had started.
It is tempting to forget that when you asked, “Does this spot look purple to you?” you didn’t need to say anything else for everyone around you to know just what was on your mind, if not on your skin, and how fast your heart was racing as you uttered the words as casually as you could because sounding casual seemed to increase the chances of a reassuring response.
It is tempting to forget that there was a time when gay men were hoping not to lose weight, that plump meant healthy and healthy reassuring. And reassuring, in a turnabout so shocking for us then, meant sexy.
It is tempting to forget that people were dropping like flies, that many gay men in cities like New York or San Francisco were crossing out name after name from their address books, and it is tempting to forget that many gay men who had long left their families behind in favor of friendships were now left only with mere acquaintances, no one close still living.
It is tempting to forget how parents who had once expelled their faggot son now rushed to his bedside to keep te lovers and friends away, to contest the will, and to snatch the spoils of a life lived far from the tender bosom of the family.
It is tempting to forget that women never “got” AIDS but somehow died of it by the thousands.
It is tempting to forget that the truth could only be whispered or screamed but seldom simply told.
It is tempting to forget that kids were chased out of schools by their friends’ parents and by their friends and that their houses were burned to the ground.
It is tempting to forget that Ryan White was once described as a “homophiliac” in a newspaper.
It is tempting to forget the frightened medics and undertakers and the cop’s face masks and latex gloves, as they arrested dying young men and women fighting for their lives.
It is tempting to forget ACT UP’s unforgettable chant, “They’ll see you on the news; your gloves don’t match your shoes!”
It is tempting to forget angry queers screaming bloody murder and spitting out hosts in St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York.
It is tempting to forget the pictures of Dorian Gray on TV and on the pages of magazines, the emaciated faces covered with lesions, the hollow stares, and the feeling that one might as well have been looking at a charred and contorted body hanging from a tree, like Billie Holiday’s strange fruit, as the crowd cheered.
It is tempting to forget gay-related immune deficiency and the gay cancer and the 4-H club — homosexual, heroin addict, hemophiliac, Haitian — and all the conspiracy theories and miracle cures that we knew were bullshit yet couldn’t help but consider just in case, because madness could make sense.
It is tempting to forget the promise of a vaccine in about five years and that it felt like such an eternity that researchers sounded almost apologetic when explaining that retroviruses are particularly treacherous foes.
It is tempting to forget the calls for quarantine camps and tattoos and mass expulsions, “solutions” whose pros and cons were discussed with the sort of equanimity now applied to the debate on torture.
It is tempting to forget that nobody gave a shit.
It is tempting to forget that all this is still happening far, far away from here.
It is tempting to forget and it is easy.
pp. 9-10, The Nearness of Others: Searching for Tact and Contact in the Age of HIV, David Caron.
Harry disappears from the wizarding world for a little while after the fall of Voldemort and only like Ron Hermione and Ginny know where he’s gone
but he’s traveling. he considered backpacking Europe, but then he realized he’d had enough of camping for at least twenty years, so he teaches himself to drive and pulls enough strings to get himself an American drivers’ license and and then he’s off on a roadtrip in a beat-up car that’s still fast as anything. he doesn’t use magic if he can help it because it feels tainted, feels like it belongs to the war, feels like it marks him out again as someone with power and responsibility and the weight of a world on his shoulders. and for now he wants to find out what it is not to be a world-saving wizard, but just to be Harry.
and he meets a lot of strangers (he figures it’s safe enough picking up hitchhikers when they’re more than likely muggles and he’s got his wand if anything bad happens) and he learns what it’s like to be just another face, another car on the road and he learns all sorts of stuff on the radio, tries every genre out there. and it’s nice to listen to stuff that isn’t specifically designed to remind him of the wizarding world, but he finds so much of it surprisingly relatable and sometimes he just breaks down sobbing at the wheel and has to pull over.
and one of the hitchhikers he picks up is a veteran, and Harry doesn’t tell him much but he does say that he’s been a soldier, too, and it’s hard adjusting to a life that you never thought would exist because things were so hard that you could not imagine yourself after. hard to think about settling down and marrying the girl you thought you’d die loving. hard to think that not everyone around you is an enemy. were you a prisoner of war? the veteran asks. or undercover? both, says Harry. and lost, not knowing whether I was on the run or on a mission that was taking a year. I got back alive in the end but something—something’s definitely dead, you know?
how old are you, says the veteran. I’m eighteen, says Harry. the veteran raises his eyebrows. but they both know that some armies, some wars, don’t care about your age.
I think the dead thing is me, Harry says one day, when he’s going seventy in a fifty-five mile zone and the sun is setting in their eyes. when I killed the enemy, I killed myself.
and the veteran looks at him for a very long moment and Harry slows down and looks back at him and at last the man says, no. no, you lived. and you’re going to keep living, son, and one day you’ll be ready to marry that girl, if you love her, and now that you’ve got out of the war, it’s time to get the war out of you.
(they almost have a wreck when Harry pulls over to the side of the road, gets out, sits in the grass and laughs through his tears. flowers start to spring up around him and he feels the magic in his core, but this time it’s peaceful and pure and fun. unspoiled. and he knows it won’t always feel this way but for now things are leaking out of him, joyful things, because he is the boy who lived again, the boy who lived after the war.)
Your hugs heal people. But it comes with a cost. It decreases your own lifespan by 5%. Only the the richest of the rich come to see you. You have cured clients with cancer, aids, incurable diseases and more. However, those poor children dying in the hospital, the urge to help them eats you alive. You are getting depressed as you can’t stand this injustice any longer. You set out to visit a hospital for children with terminal illnesses. You write two words on a piece of cardboard: FREE HUGS
Okay, so let’s assume that each time you hug someone your life span gets decreased by 5% of what’s left (meaning if you’re 50 and have 100 year’s total to love, those 5% would only be 2.5 years. Furthermore, after that you’re only supposed to get 97.5 years old anymore, so when your lifespan decreases by further 5%, it’s only 2.375 years your life gets shortened by - which is 5% of the 47.5 years you have left).
In that case you would, contrary to what many assume here, be able to give more than twenty hugs.
Now, let’s furthermore assume that you were 16 when you first did that - let’s say by accident. At this point you where supposed to get 100 years old.
The next time you did this was when you where 18 years old. After that, you started doing it for money - According to the text it should be at least 5 times - one time cancer, one time aids, “incurable diseases” is a plural, so that’s two, and “more” means at least one more. So let’s be generous and say you did this 7 times total.
Now, I’m assuming “richest of the rich” means at least Top 100.
According to this page that’d be Aliko Dangote, with a fortune of $14.1 Billion. So, as we’re assuming he’s the last one who can afford you - and people would be willing to pay a lot for something like this, let’s put the price for one hug at $7 billion.
Now, according to this site here living in San Francisco costs an average of $1114 per month. But you get a lot of money. So let’s say you need $5000 a month. That’d mean you get along for 116,666.66666… years.
And that’s assuming those people are only willing to sent half their fortune to save their lives, and you need more than four times the money of an average citizen of San Francisco to get by, which I doubt.
But okay, let’s assume you need new money every two years for one reason or another.
And we said you give seven hugs for money, minus the one you have at sixteen.
After the hug at 16, you would still be supposed to get 95.8 years old.
At 18, you therefore would have 77.8 years left.
Now, we said 7 hugs, every two years. At the end of those 14 years, you would still be supposed to get roughly 76.26 years old. That gives you 44.26 more years.
Now let’s say another year passes before you decide you’ve had enough. 43.26 years left.
And let’s say one hug lasts for ten second, and it takes fifty seconds for someone new to appear and hug you. That’d 40s per hug, or rather 0.000001902588 … Years.
By the time you would be below 20 years to live, at 19.0398572624416057301619011187264404296875 to be exact, you would have hugged 17 people.
It’s getting really tiresome to put all of this into my phone calculator, though, so I’ll write an algorithm to do the actual calculations for me tomorrow and then tell you exactly how many kids you can hug until you fall down dead.
Edit:
I’m also pretty sure I made a typo while putting this in. Again, I’ll look into it tomorrow
I was going to reblog a story, but wow! You would at least be able to give 100+ hugs if you take it slow. Eventually you will have an hour or so left to live and one hug would only decrease your remaining lifespan by three minutes.
Behold Zeno’s Paradox - if it’s 5% each time, you could technically hug an infinite number of people before you go, limited only by how fast you can hug. There’d come a point that your hug would take longer than your remaining life, unfortunately, but what a way to go.
Mr. Rogers had an intentional manner of speaking to children, which his writers called “Freddish”. There were nine steps for translating into Freddish:
“State the idea you wish to express as clearly as possible, and in terms preschoolers can understand.” Example: It is dangerous to play in the street.
“Rephrase in a positive manner,” as in It is good to play where it is safe.
“Rephrase the idea, bearing in mind that preschoolers cannot yet make subtle distinctions and need to be redirected to authorities they trust.” As in, “Ask your parents where it is safe to play.”
“Rephrase your idea to eliminate all elements that could be considered prescriptive, directive, or instructive.” In the example, that’d mean getting rid of “ask”: Your parents will tell you where it is safe to play.
“Rephrase any element that suggests certainty.” That’d be “will”: Your parents can tell you where it is safe to play.
“Rephrase your idea to eliminate any element that may not apply to all children.” Not all children know their parents, so: Your favorite grown-ups can tell you where it is safe to play.
“Add a simple motivational idea that gives preschoolers a reason to follow your advice.” Perhaps: Your favorite grown-ups can tell you where it is safe to play. It is good to listen to them.
“Rephrase your new statement, repeating the first step.” “Good” represents a value judgment, so: Your favorite grown-ups can tell you where it is safe to play. It is important to try to listen to them.
“Rephrase your idea a final time, relating it to some phase of development a preschooler can understand.” Maybe: Your favorite grown-ups can tell you where it is safe to play. It is important to try to listen to them, and listening is an important part of growing.
Rogers brought this level of care and attention not just to granular
details and phrasings, but the bigger messages his show would send.
Hedda Sharapan, one of the staff members at Fred Rogers’s production
company, Family Communications, Inc., recalls Rogers once halted taping
of a show when a cast member told the puppet Henrietta Pussycat not to
cry; he interrupted shooting to make it clear that his show would never
suggest to children that they not cry.
In working on the show,
Rogers interacted extensively with academic researchers. Daniel R.
Anderson, a psychologist formerly at the University of Massachusetts who
worked as an advisor for the show, remembered a speaking trip to
Germany at which some members of an academic audience raised questions
about Rogers’s direct approach on television. They were concerned that
it could lead to false expectations from children of personal support
from a televised figure. Anderson was impressed with the depth of
Rogers’s reaction, and with the fact that he went back to production
carefully screening scripts for any hint of language that could confuse
children in that way.
In fact, Freddish and Rogers’s philosophy of
child development is actually derived from some of the leading
20th-century scholars of the subject. In the 1950s, Rogers, already well
known for a previous children’s TV program, was pursuing a graduate
degree at The Pittsburgh Theological Seminary when a teacher there
recommended he also study under the child-development expert Margaret
McFarland at the University of Pittsburgh. There he was exposed to the
theories of legendary faculty, including McFarland, Benjamin Spock, Erik
Erikson, and T. Berry Brazelton. Rogers learned the highest standards
in this emerging academic field, and he applied them to his program for
almost half a century.
This is one of the reasons Rogers was so
particular about the writing on his show. “I spent hours talking with
Fred and taking notes,” says Greenwald, “then hours talking with
Margaret McFarland before I went off and wrote the scripts. Then Fred
made them better.” As simple as Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood looked and sounded, every detail in it was the product of a tremendously careful, academically-informed process.
That idea is REALLY worth learning to talk to the kiddos. Mr. Rogers still has a lot to teach us–especially for our own kids.
I love literally any framing device. I love reminders that the story I’m reading/watching/hearing is a story that is being told, in the universe in which it happened or in another. I love the sense that these characters, these events, are remembered, and retold. Did you know that “legend” is the root of the gerundive conjugation of the Latin verb “legere”, so that a literal translation is “[that which] should/must be read”? I love the narrator of Just So stories, and Christopher Sly in The Taming of the Shrew, and the fact that the entire comic Girl Genius is canonically historical fiction written by two very minor characters, decades after the events of the story. I was very young when I first read Sam and Frodo huddling on the burning slope of Mount Doom and talking about how they would one day be spoken of at homey firesides as “Nine-Fingered Frodo and the Ring of Doom”, another mighty chapter in the great tale goin back to the Beren and Luthien and the Silmarils, and Feanor and the Trees, and the creation of Arda itself - read it in a copy, you know, of Professor Tolkien’s translation of a leatherbound book he found in a barn in the country one day, in which the original author had inscribed the tale (so-called) of the Downfall of the Lord of the Rings, and the Return of the King (as seen by the Little People, being the memoirs of Bilbo and Frodo of the Shire, supplemented by the accounts of their friends and the learning of the Wise. Together with extracts from Books of Lore translated by Bilbo in Rivendell.)
Telling stories is like 80% of how people communicate!! Tell me about your day! Did you hear that Janet from Accounting is sleeping with Brad from Marketing! I have so much homework; here’s twenty pictures of my dog; I got into a car accident on my vacation, let me tell you about my experiences, because they are worth remembering and retelling.
