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So I'm having thoughts about LOTR. Specifically the ending. And the fanfiction that rewrites the ending. Bear with me.

So we all know that LOTR ends with Frodo leaving Middle Earth and going to the Undying Lands, right. And we all know that he does this because all the events of the story have had such an impact on him that they've left him quite traumatised and not really able to live life the way he used to. And we can probably all guess that this is a reflection of how Tolkien may have thought about his trauma after fighting in the First World War.

The ending makes sense considering the time the book was written, because in the 1940's and 50's, people didn't know as much about mental health and disability as they do now, and there weren't as many ways to help people manage disabilities other than institutionalising them or like. Giving them cocaine or something idk. So it's reasonable to assume that because Tolkien didn't see many ways that people could live with disabilities and be happy, he couldn't write them into LOTR and instead basically just put Frodo in Middle Earth's equivalent of Heaven and said "there you go, you're all better now".

I like this as a sort of tragic ending. I mean, you can't deny that someone being so drastically changed by an experience means they can't enjoy the things they grew up with is pretty tragic. The ending does make sense. But I kind of hate it.

I don't think it was written badly or anything, and I'm not trying to dismiss Tolkien's experiences that influenced this ending. My issue with it is that, when you look at it through a modern lens, it has vaguely ableist connotations. Specifically the idea that disabled people (Frodo) can't live full lives and be happy in the real world (Middle Earth) and can therefore only be happy when they're "cured" or when they die and go to Heaven (the Undying Lands).

Now obviously LOTR is an old book and it's important to consider the time it was created when analysing it, as you would do with any other piece of classic literature. A lot of old books have some outdated language and concepts in them, simply because that was normal back then. And until very recently, we probably wouldn't have thought the ending of LOTR was in any way problematic. And it might not have been, because it's not really the fact that Tolkien wrote that ending that's an issue; it's the fact that the way the world worked back then made it near impossible to even think about any other ending.

Since the book was written, though, there have been a lot of advancements in science and research into disabilities, and there are now much more effective ways to treat and manage them. There's medication and therapy for physical and mental issues, and there are lots of accommodations that we can and should put in place to make life easier for everyone. Back in the 1940's, Tolkien wouldn't have had these things, and therefore didn't consider them to be options when writing about what happens to Frodo at the end of the story. But now, we do have them, and it's this progress that has discredited the idea that disabled people can't be happy in the real world, and subsequently made LOTR's ending seem outdated by today's standards.

Now this is where the fanfiction comes in.

LOTR readers these days, who are aware of the progress we've made as a society and the new ways people view and treat minorities, often write fanfiction that puts things into Tolkien's universe that wouldn't have otherwise been there because of when the books were written, from openly queer characters to characters living good, happy lives with disabilities. And I think this is a good thing and it's really nice to see, especially in regards to Frodo's disability. I like seeing people work out how he might accommodate himself in the world of Middle Earth, and how the other characters would help him with that. I like that sometimes people have to get creative when figuring out how he would cope with trauma and chronic pain, because obviously Middle Earth doesn't have a lot of the things we have in the real world.

I like that we can finally give Frodo a chance to recover in a more realistic way than just sending him to the afterlife. I like that we can finally allow him to live.

A lot of Tolkien purists complain about new adaptations and fanfiction because "it's not what Tolkien wrote so he wouldn't like it". First of all, why do we still care about the opinions of a man who's been dead for over fifty years? What are you going to do, summon his ghost to haunt all the fanfic writers? Hold a seance to find out exactly what he thinks? Good luck with that.

Second of all, I honestly believe this is something he would approve of. He went on living after the First World War, but he didn't get to live with the disability accommodations we have today. And because he didn't, neither did Frodo. We can't give Tolkien the life many disabled people have now, but we can give it to his tragic hero. We can make his story a little less tragic. And if Tolkien was here now, of all the tropes we're using in LOTR fanfiction, it wouldn't surprise me if "Frodo stays in the Shire" is one he could get behind.

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Final Fantasy XVI Concept Artworks

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Sometimes I wonder if entertainment folk purposefully try to craft some scenes or situations or shots with the deliberate intent of making it seem meme worthy. There has to be some sort of data-collected outline of what producers or execs think would make a viral meme template. They’re jealous of the free advertisement Spider-Man and supernatural and dr who get and want to manufacture that bottled marketing lightning.

Then I wonder what the failed attempts are, if we’re missing cringe gold not knowing that this or that scene was a blatant attempt at memery. Or I wonder if there were any successful campaigns and if there are industry meme-wizards who have shown a highly coveted knack for this sort of thing. Or I wonder -

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an internal memo leaked from ceo steve huffman saying the "noise" of the blackout will die out and they just need to weather it until we give up. fuck you spez.

first of all it's OVER EIGHT THOUSAND subreddits that went dark.

second of all he clearly doesn't give one single shit about the users or the UNPAID army of mods who slog through a million miles of shit every day to keep illegal and offensive content off the site (i'm a mod in a small fandom subreddit and even the shit i've seen is beyond the pale) and therefore make it appealing to the advertizers.

you have no fucking business without us. and you don't care one single bit about it.

he clearly did not mean for this memo to leak, but someone at reddit thought it was important enough to send it out anyway. please spread it (spreddit?) especially because so much of reddit is still in blackout.

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Some of my coworkers work on tree ring data. We use a terrific piece of software called CooRecorder, which takes scanned images of tree cores and let's you create a position file that maps out where each ring is. This is opposed to the traditional method of measuring tree cores, where you put the core on a little rolling platform, look at it under a microscope and had a device that measured how much you moved the platform between marking rings. (Total nightmare, extremely difficult to realize where you'd made a mistake.) It's a great, user friendly piece of software that only costs $68. By comparison, the main competitor costs close to $10k.

When I was buying new licenses a couple years ago, I looked into the story of this software. Apparently this couple bought an old house in southern Sweden in the 1980s, and wanted to date the house using ring widths from its timber beams. Straightforward! But at the time, all the dendrochronology labs refused to share their methods for measuring tree ring widths or any data to cross-correlate their records. So they decided, you know what, we can build software--we'll just do it ourselves. And they created CooRecorder, as well as their own library of ring widths. That's why it's such a good price, it's meant to be accessible. Now tree ring width data is widely shared, and it's easy to create a reference.

Here's the turn for the hilarious and bizarre: there is a well known area of poor correspondence in European oaks from antiquity (Roman era, ~ 518 BC to 314 AD) and modern day (AD ~381 - today). It's believed the Romans cut down too many trees and the weather was bad, leading to many years with missing or hard to measure rings. People have been working on creating better references that span that 'Roman gap'; it's a known issue. However, our Swedish Ring Width Robin Hood couple has decided they have solved the problem once and for all: that misalignment is actually because EVERY SINGLE RECORD OF WESTERN CIVILIZATION IS WRONG BY OVER TWO HUNDRED WHOLE YEARS. Everybody--the Byzantine empire, the Roman Empire--just colluded and wholesale made up 232 years of history. I am actually writing this to you in the Year of Our Lord 1791. Their self-published papers get deep into aligning records of Roman comets, eclipses, etc, with other known astrological phenomena to get the 'correct' dates (they note that this is difficult and the astrologers who 'faked' the records in the Christian era did a very good job), and now they've moved on to re-dating everything in ancient Egypt. It gets very red-string-Pepe-Silva.jpg very quickly, which would be fun except that the papers are completely unreadable and clearly no historian has ever been consulted.

Overall, a great example of how you can make a terrific contribution to science in one area and have no idea what you are talking about in other areas. Stay safe out there folks.

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Concept Artwork ‘Final Fantasy’ Famicom