I cannot emphasize enough that although we can take a lot of lessons from fyre festival about: conspicuous consumption, social media marketing, parallel economies, the fundamental scam artistry of the ‘young entrepreneur’ luxury economy, etc., the real lesson we should take away is how easy it is to lure a bunch of rich people onto an isolated island with no hope of escape.
The best time to have planted a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is now. Did you plant one 19 years ago? You may as well just go fuck yourself
*chanting like a mantra* I am an adult who studies physics i am an adult who studies physics i am an adult who studies physics i am an adult who studies physics
so i just finished watching the extended editions of the trilogy which is nearly 13 hrs long and this meme is correctsomehow. this is the only line legolas speaks to frodo in the entire series. the only other debatable line is a scene in fellowship where legolas is speaking to gimli but frodo just happens to be near them and he’s cut to for a reaction shot. i wouldn’t really count it though since it wasnt directed at him.
someone already posted this but the kicker is at the end of return of the king where frodo sees the fellowship again and calls out to everyone by name except for legolas lmaooo
PLS i swear i saw this in another version of this post but i can’t find it now
if anyone knows who wrote this scenario tag them so they can have credit asldfjslkf
i was playing pokemon blue on stream earlier at 350% speed and i got to thinking
what if the reason nobody in the pokemon world has any good teams is because its considered a dick move to have a proper team comp
like culturally everyone is like “haha pick the pokemon you want! if you’re happy with three geodudes, thats you and your life!” and then you’re supposed to just have a friendly battle with any other pokemon trainers and whatever pokemon they just happen to have
like the average trainer is probably just walking around with a growlithe because that’s their pet, or a hiker has three geodudes because the geodudes help him with hiking. and if this pet owner and geodude hiker meet, you’re supposed to have a friendly battle but nothing too serious
now imagine the 10 year old kid that has six pokeballs on their belt comes up. you’re like “haha, we’ll have a friendly battle!” and you throw out your geodude
and they throw out a fucking gyarados, and it one-shots your geodude
and then you throw out your pidgey you have because the pidgey helps you navigate mountains because you’re a hiker
and then electricity crackles around the gyarados and a thunderbolt flies off of this giant dragon and evaporates your pidgey
so you’re down to your last pokemon. you tell them you’re gonna send out your bulbasaur. the ten year old is like “oh okay in that case i’m gonna pull out my vulpix.” like not only is this kid walking around with an amped-up super dragon, but theyve also got multiple pokemon specifically for making type advantage counter-picks?
this kid’s a fucking asshole! really, kid? what are you trying to prove here? this is a friendly match between strangers for fun! why are you composing real-ass competitive teams? what a fucker!
i mean if you look at how npc’s talk about their pokemon, they’re service animals mostly. some of them are just pets. apparently they really enjoy sparring, so you let them battle other people’s pokemon for socialization, it’s like going to the dog park.
hell yes i’d be mad if i took my chronic pain support chow-chow to the dog park and some asshole with four rottweilers and a husky was like SIC EM THUNDERNUTS even if my dog enjoyed the tussle at first.
look, kid, the paras helps me weed the garden. it’s not a special forces attack paras. it’s just a bug that eats dandelions. please calm down.
This is precisely why Cooltrainers are exiled to the mountains
Legolas pretty quickly gets in the habit of venting about his travelling companions in Elvish, so long as Gandalf & Aragorn aren’t in earshot they’ll never know right?
Then about a week into their journey like
Legolas: *in Elvish, for approximately the 20th time* ugh fucking hobbits, so annoying
Frodo: *also in Elvish, deadpan* yeah we’re the worst
Legolas:
~*~earlier~*~
Legolas: ugh fucking hobbits
Merry: Frodo what’d he say
Frodo: I’m not sure he speaks a weird dialect but I think he’s insulting us. I should tell him I can understand Elvish
Tim Rice: Yes, Andrew, run to your work. Hide behind your Cats. I’ve come to tell you I am leaving because I thought you might care to know. Foolish of me, because you care about nothing
Andrew Lloyd Webber: I care about many things
Tim Rice: Cats—not people
Andrew Lloyd Webber: People, too. I cannot divide my feelings up as neatly as you, and I am not hiding behind my Heavenside Layer—I am living in it
Tim Rice: What you care for is yourself
Andrew Lloyd Webber: I care for this megamusical. You will be in this megamusical.
Tim Rice: I am something you can use
Andrew Lloyd Webber: I had thought you understood
Tim Rice: It’s because I understand that I left. That I am leaving
Andrew Lloyd Webber: Then there’s nothing I can say. Is there?
a lot of really dumb shit happens in tlj but I gotta say… the fact that Leia apparently took the time to redo her makeup and hair and change her outfit after getting out of the coma?? while they’re literally racing against time and in mortal danger?? hmm
there’s something endlessly hilarious to me about the phrase “hotly debated” in an academic context. like i just picture a bunch of nerds at podiums & one’s like “of coursethere was a paleolithic bear cult in Northern Eurasia” and another one just looks him in the eye and says “i’l kill you in real life, kevin”
I heard a story once about two microbiologists at a conference who took it out into the parking lot to have a literal fistfight over taxonomy.
have i told this story yet? idk but it’s good. The Orangutan Story:
my american lit professor went to this poe conference. like to be clear this is a man who has a doctorate in being a book nerd. he reads moby dick to his four-year-old son. and poe is one of the cornerstones of american literature, right, so this should be right up his alley?
wrong. apparently poe scholars are like, advanced. there is a branch of edgar allen poe scholarship that specifically looks for coded messages based on the number of words per line and letters per word poe uses. my professor, who has a phd in american literature, realizes he is totally out of his depth. but he already committed his day to this so he thinks fuck it! and goes to a panel on racism in poe’s works, because that’s relevant to his interests.
background info: edgar allen poe was a broke white alcoholic from virginia who wrote horror in the first half of the 19th century. rule 1 of Horror Academia is that horror reflects the cultural anxieties of its time (see: my other professor’s sermon abt how zombie stories are popular when people are scared of immigrants, or that purge movie that was literally abt the election). since poe’s shit is a product of 1800s white southern culture, you can safely assume it’s at least a little about race. but the racial subtext is very open to interpretation, and scholars believe all kinds of different things about what poe says about race (if he says anything), and the poe stans get extremely tense about it.
so my professor sits down to watch this panel and within like five minutes a bunch of crusty academics get super heated about poe’s theoretical racism. because it’s academia, though, this is limited to poorly concealed passive aggression and forceful tones of inside voice. one professor is like “this isn’t even about race!” and another professor is like “this proves he’s a racist!” people are interrupting each other. tensions are rising. a panelist starts saying that poe is like writing a critique of how racist society was, and the racist stuff is there to prove that racism is stupid, and that on a metaphorical level the racist philosophy always loses—
then my professor, perhaps in a bid to prove that he too is a smart literature person, loudly calls: “BUT WHAT ABOUT THE ORANGUTAN?”
some more background: in poe’s well-known short story “the murder in the rue morgue,” two single ladies—a lovely old woman and her lovely daughter who takes care of her, aka super vulnerable and respectable people—are violently killed. the murderer turns out to be not a person, but an orangutan brought back by a sailor who went to like burma or something. and it’s pretty goddamn racially coded, like they reeeeally focus on all this stuff about coarse hairs and big hands and superhuman strength and chattering that sounds like people talking but isn’t actually. if that’s intentional, then he’s literally written an analogy about how black people are a threat to vulnerable white women, which is classic white supremacist shit. BUT if he really only meant for it to be an orangutan, then it’s a whole other metaphor about how colonialism pillages other countries and brings their wealth back to europe and that’s REALLY gonna bite them in the ass one day. klansman or komrade? it all hangs on this.
so the place goes dead fucking silent as every giant ass poe stan in the room is immediately thrust into a series of war flashbacks: the orangutan argument, violently carried out over seminar tables, in literary journals, at graduate student house parties, the spittle flying, the wine and coffee spilled, the friendships torn—the red faces and bulging veins—curses thrown and teaching posts abandoned—panels just like this one fallen into chaos—distant sirens, skies falling, the dog-eared norton critical editions slicing through the air like sabres—the textual support! o, the quotes! they gaze at this madman in numb disbelief, but he could not have known. nay, he was a literary theorist, a 17th-century man, only a visitor to their haunted land. he had never heard the whistle of the mortars overhead. he had never felt the cold earth under his cheek as he prayed for god’s deliverance. and yet he would have broken their fragile peace and brought them all back into the trenches.
much later, when my professor told this story to a poe nerd friend, the guy said the orangutan thing was a one of the biggest landmines in their field. he said it was a reliable discussion ruiner that had started so many shouting matches that some conferences had an actual ban on bringing it up.
so my professor sits there for a second, still totally clueless. then out of the dead silence, the panel moderator stands up in his tweed jacket and yells, with the raw panic of a once-broken man:
