Just got a gorgeous piece of wood burning art from Ivy Yves Art - the Second Breakfast Board.
Isn't this the cutest thing ever? 😄

At the Tolkien Music Festival in Mirandola, Italy (August 30-31), the pieces "The Grey Havens", "Lalaith", "Lorien" (world premiere) and "The Great Horn of Helm" of a composer that I'm working with will be performed:
www.tolkienmusicfestival.it

Best programmer joke I've seen lately:

A test customer walks into a bar and orders 1 beer. A test customer walks into a bar and orders 99.5 beers. A test customer walks into a bar and orders -7 beers.
Test complete.
A real customer walks into a bar and asks where the bathroom is. The bar explodes.

Just found a quote from The Wanderer in Patrick Wolf's Hymn of The Haar:
"Or were the voices just too loud today to let you tell anybody?
Or back across the bar them pray, oft him anhaga are gebideð."

So from now on this song will always remind me of the Lament for the Rohirrim.

Already learned two new words from Tolkien this year (which I apparently didn't pay attention to during any of my previous rereadings of Lord of the Rings): "tussocky" and "countrified"

I think they're kind of cute.

I enjoyed this one a lot! Richard II at the Bridge Theatre. Mini thread about it follows (not spoiler-free).

Well, this was interesting. Little thread about the RSC's latest Hamlet for my fellow Shakespeare enthusiasts (spoiler-free).

Mary Beard: "(...) news traveled widely and quickly, even by the rudimentary methods of ancient communication – messengers, word of mouth, and, on rare occasions, a system of beacons."

Inevitably, I'm now listening to The Return of The King soundtrack while reading SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome.

Almost ruined my keyboard by dropping another very heavy book on it. Last month my Latin dictionary dented a couple of keys and today the Complete Norton Shakespeare actually knocked a few of them out. I apparently need to rethink keeping my heaviest books on the shelf right above my desk..

After having finished The Way of Kings, I'm wondering if Sanderson eventually does something with the fact that women are basically the only ones who are literate in The Way of Kings - but they are not the ones in power, although so many people in the book rely heavily on written communication. 1/2

Is it just me or is anyone else reminded of Beethoven's Symphony No. 7, Allegretto in "A Shield-maiden of Rohan" at 6:11?

youtu.be/cUF-47-_2O4?...

This year's Comic Con haul: "Three Locations" from The World of Arda by Aronja Art: aronjaart-shop.com/collections/...

Aren't they gorgeous?