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I’ve gotten to Rohan Proper and I KNEW it was coming but I didn’t know exactly when or how and just. Wow okay the fact that it’s Aragorn who knows The Wanderer, and translates it… oh my fucking god. Of course Aragorn knows this one, the way he knows Beren & Luthien. Of course Aragorn on-the-spot translates The Wanderer. Beautifully. With some poetic license, but it is p much one century on and no one cares, everyone loves “Where now the horse and the rider”.

(I suspect THIS piece of early medieval lore is more widely known, but if you’ve never read this actual facts real life poem The Wanderer (aka the Lament of Rohirrim) in full — Aragorn just quotes an extract near the end — I highly recommend it. Literally everyone loves The Wanderer. Translating Beowulf sucks and I hate it. Translating The Wanderer feels like reading Lord of the Rings. And not just because it is… in LOTR).

Rutgers translations are always a little more fun and lively; Roy Liuzza’s translation is maybe my top choice. And of course the original Old English is great stuff. I mean, “Swa cweath eardstappa”?? Aragornnnn

Liuzza’s translation, the OG Old English, and Tolkien’s version (he added some stuff, and mixed in a few themes from later lines):

Also FYI the reason I knew it was coming is because my Old English teacher’s great joy was assigning her class this section of The Wanderer for a warm-up translation at the start of class, and then and sit back watching as the realization tore violently through the ranks.

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more catholic yaoi for you

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If I tell you this is a horror dance number it still won't prepare you. That last move was so terrifying even the judge was like "Let go! Let go!" If you told me they're actually possessed I'd believe you.

The music is a remix of the song Mere Dholna from the Bollywood movie Bhool Bhulaiyya, a remake of the classic Malayalam horror-comedy Manichitrathazhu. It's about a young bride that seemingly becomes possessed of Manjulika, a dancer of the ancient royal court whose tragic death has turned her into a vengeful spirit, one who evokes the wrath of the goddess Durga Kali. In the iconic scene that is repeated across remakes, the groom and his family discover his bride dancing in the dead of night in a manic, disassociative fugue, wearing a moth-eaten dancer's costume and a face smeared in kohl, ash and vermilion. She's hallucinating that she's Manjulika dancing carefree for the court with her lover. The upbeat music is deliberately incongruous with the pathos and creepiness of the scene in reality, especially as it crescendos in the bride's head to the moment when the king decapitates Manjulika's beloved in a fit of jealous rage.

This specific number is by the all-male troupe B Unique, performed for the Indian reality talent contest Hunabaarz. It's a modern fusion based on Bharatnatyam that turns up the creep factor by 200% and is basically a showcase of contortionism and synchronicity. One of the most perfectly choreographed and executed dances I have ever seen. Truly incredible!

The group is still taking their work across the world's talent shows. And yes, that guy is hypermobile enough to turn his head like an owl.

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magneto can create force fields and levitate by supposedly strengthening and  riding magnetic waves, but he can also stop bullets (which are not made of a ferromagnetic material, but rather lead) meaning he may just have telekinesis and fooled himself into thinking he can only move metals through the power of assumption and placebo- in this essay i will-

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There is so much love here, i can’t even. It might get me a little teary eyed. 

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This explorator is blessed with multifunctionality

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in absolute tears about the pride module at my work

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Fuck moon’s taking poison damage

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i'm so glad goncharov happened when it did, right before prolific public use of AI. that was pure honest gaslighting straight from the heart. real human whimsicality and trickery thru blood sweat and tears. we were a family. and we all gonched, together. you cant replicate that with any machine.

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I will never let anyone forget about this

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Vulcan teen on Vulcan [tiktok] saying "I have just lost track of my father in the grocery store." The camera turns to show the viewers the grocery store in which almost every single older middle-aged man has a bowlcut and long robes. Camera turns back to show the teen's face which is expressionless and yet communicates all it needs to.

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I need help finding a Transformers fanfic series on ao3

It's an au of g1, where the volcano and eruption that uncovered the arc was Mt. St. Helen's. It was really cool. The world building was fascinating. There were multiple fics in the series.

I thought i bookmarked it, but I can't find it, and I can't remember the name of the series or any of the individual fics. Help would be much appreciated.

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Cage-fighter Wolverine. Every year I tell myself I'm going to try and do more painting and lighting practice, so this year I'm starting it off with some.

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I think about Azula shooters often and their common refrain of "if Azula hadn't had a mental breakdown, she would've won" and I'm here to tell you that no, she wouldn't have.

There is no universe in which Azula was winning that fight with Zuko (or Katara, for that matter).

Azula spent so much of Book 2 being built up as this deadly terrifying force against whom the heroes are badly outmatched that it can be difficult to catch exactly how quickly Zuko is advancing.

Back up a bit to Book One. For the fearsome exiled crown prince of the Fire Nation, Zuko's not that impressive a firebender. He's not bad by any stretch, and he's able to lay the untrained Sokka and Katara flat pretty easily. Then he gets in the ring with Aang, who is an airbending master, and the difference between a regular bender and a master becomes apparent when Aang literally puts his ass to bed:

People have attributed this to the fact that no one's fought an airbender in 100 years, but I think it's also worth noting that Aang (a 12 year old from a pacifist nation) has probably never fought anyone before. Like, ever. And yet the second Aang thinks "okay, I'll attack back", the fight's over.

Zuko's got the same genetic predisposition for firebending talent that Azula does, yet it never seems to manifest because of his mental blocks. At the beginning of the series, he's already so beat down that all he really has is conviction, pride, and anger, so even with training from Iroh (the firebending master, thank you very much), he struggles. Yet throughout Book 2, when he has no time to train because he's on the run, he actually seems to advance faster. The fact that his bending is literally tied to his character arc (as his morals become tangled and he has to fight off aforementioned mental blocks) is pretty brilliant. Like, by the time of the Crossroads of Destiny, Zuko getting his ass handed to him by Aang is a pretty consistent feature of the show--he just can't match wits with him.

Hell, at the beginning of the series, he and Iroh (again: the actual firebending master) launch a combined power surface-to-air attack...which Aang casually swats away into a nearby ice wall. Come the Crossroads of Destiny, however, and Zuko by himself launches this bigass fireball that blows through Aang's defenses.

Zuko advances so quickly that it's scary. That prodigious talent is in him even if it doesn't come through as cleanly as with Azula. Who, by the way, was busy about to get flattened by Katara some few dozen feet away, until Zuko took over and then effectively stalemated her himself.

All of this in retrospect makes it abundantly clear why Zuko's firebending seemed to skyrocket so much when he learned true firebending from the Sun Warriors: it was really the only thing left. He's hard a hard road learning how to fight waterbenders, earthbenders, and airbenders, and even if unconsciously, he's applying the philosophy Iroh taught him about augmenting his bending style with aspects of other styles (see also, the waterbending-like fire whips he uses in the above gif). Once he actually understands fire and how it works, he's got it mastered. Hence why any gap between him and Azula effectively disappears as soon as their next fight--before her friends have betrayed her and her stability goes out the window. There's no real sense of urgency to their fight at the Boiling Rock prison. True, Sokka's presence with the sword helps, but Zuko doesn't look remotely worried and he counters Azula's every attack perfectly.

All her life, Azula only ever learned fire. She was taught by the best people the fire nation can employ, so she knows all the cool tricks, but she's still poisoned by the corrupted firebending practiced in the modern ATLA timeline. Unlike Zuko, who managed to get the basics if nothing else from Iroh (fire comes from the breath, and can be used to survive as much as to kill), Azula has always used fire as a weapon and a means to hurt others. She has no true knowledge of the craft, meaning she's got the same weaknesses as Zhao, she's just better disciplined to the point she can make up for it.

Zuko's victory was a given considering Azula's complete loss of control by the time of Sozin's comet, but even had she been in a perfect mental state, she'd have lost, because in many ways Zuko is simply the better firebender.

And that's the truth of it.

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I really like the idea that McCoy's ex wife is Vulcan, so their daughter is half Vulcan. It informs so much of McCoy's behaviour to me.

I like to think his ex is not very into Vulcan culture. She's keeps some of it up, but this is a woman who chose to marry a bumpkin doctor and move to small town Earth. She's not big on the Vulcan stuff. Like, her name is T'Mari or something, but she just goes by Mary. They names their daughter Jo'hana so Mary's parents could pronounce it, but they just say Johanna. Or Jo.

So McCoy is already an expert at half Vulcan physiology, he's just learning the adult male stuff for the first time. And any Spock specific quirks. And he knows his ex, Mary, showed more emotion than Spock ever does so all Spock's arguments about being Vulcan are unconvincing. Of course, Mary mainly showed anger at the tail end of things, but hey. And he really knows what Jo's grin looks like so he knows it won't hurt Spock to smile occasionally

Of course, McCoy is fully forgetting that Spock is an adult and likes Vulcan culture in a way Mary never did and it's fucking up to him what he does. But I think this dynamic gives McCoy good cause to think he knows better (even if he's wrong). And it removes the humans as default attitude McCoy sometimes has

I especially like the idea that McCoy never mentions it cos a. Doesn't like to talk about his ex and b. It's weird to describe your daughter's medical shit in conversation. So one day Spock meets them and is just standing there like whaaat the fuuuck. What the fuck. Whatthefuck.