“At a minimum, 300 babies that wouldn’t have had HIV, now do.”

Send him to the fucking Hague

For Black History Month, did you know that one of our foundational Tolkien scholars is a Black woman? Melanie Rawls wrote "The Feminine Principle in Tolkien" (1984), among THE seminal works on women and Tolkien. She's written on JRRT and Ursula Le Guin among others and is a fantasist herself.

A thing I think may be good to emphasise right now is you don't individually need to witness each horror and that posting is not, in fact, praxis. If you want to do something find a local mutual aid group cuz there's actual stuff you can fix and help.

A pattern for troubled times:
Row 1: put your phone down
Row 2: pick up your hobby supplies
Row 3: make something for at least an hour
Row 4: take a photo of your make
Row 5: share that photo to your timeline (with alt text)
Row 6: like others' makes.

Rep rows 1-6 until time for tea.

read the Council of Elrond tonight and what really struck me this time, apart from the subtlety of the interlaced storytelling, which Tolkien is always very good at, is how funny Bilbo is in it.

Trying to accomplish anything on overcast days is… a lot.

I think “why is my brain at 30% efficiency?” Three hours later, “Oh, there’s a cloud.”