Tree Bucket posted:

Thinking fox
Balrog wings y/n
Orc souls-?
Express train
Bombadil identity debate
(Optional) uruk-hai menu

DontMockMySmock posted:

Uruk-hai menu: see my previous post

Dabir posted:

Bombadil is older than the world and came visiting from another one or something

OwlFancier posted:

I thought orcs were a kind of elf.

DACK FAYDEN posted:

Meat: back on it

DontMockMySmock posted:

Maia in general are older than the world. Bombadil isn't special in that regard. But also we don't really get any info about that; we just know that he was around in the Old Forest before even the Elves were awakened. The only sort of precedent we would have for a powerful spirit from outside the world is Ungoliant, but even she might just be an ordinary maia - it's not entirely clear.

OwlFancier posted:

I thought orcs were a kind of elf.

Hyperlynx posted:

They are in The Elder Scrolls

Phy posted:

Tom Bombadil is a Who The gently caress Knows, Man, Have You Tried Some Of Goldberry's Pastries

`Nemesis posted:

Detective No. 27 posted:

Data Graham posted:

The mmrnmhrm that will never die, “Mexican food even in its most tame and bowdlerized form is guaranteed to give you diarrhea”

Chard posted:

the meme is racism (not you DG, but the pooping from mexican food). its racism.

Facebook Aunt posted:

Beans make people gassy, there's nothing racist about that.

Chard posted:

i have never had any kind of gastric distress from the bell or any hole-in-the-wall or street cart mexican food i've ever eaten in my entire life. the one time I did have food poisoning it was from a marie calendar's. it's a racist meme, always has been, and honestly it doesn't need your defense cuz its not going away anyway lol

A talking coyote posted:

Taco Bell isn’t Mexican food, regardless of how mas they ask people to live.

Data Graham posted:

The mmrnmhrm that will never die, “Mexican food even in its most tame and bowdlerized form is guaranteed to give you diarrhea”

A GLISTENING HODOR posted:

Chard posted:

i don't give a gently caress if you get the spicy b-hole from eating one packet of mild, some people's diets don't have spice most of the time and that's fine. what's different is associating an entire class of ethnic food with getting the shits because of unclean food, and the conflation with taco bell TM is incidental. this is my last post about it but if you feel the need to keep this association in your mind, that's your choice.

DACK FAYDEN posted:

It can be either! There's the argument that there are no menus in Middle-earth because there are no restaurants in Middle-earth, just places like inns that serve whatever they've got, which I don't find very convincing. And then there's the argument that the Uruk-hai do not have a reason to know what a menu is because they don't know what restaurants are. Which really I also don't buy but I mean, it makes more sense.

A GLISTENING HODOR posted:

Doing my duty as a conscientious white intellectual and going up to the Mexican guy at work and apologizing for making fun of Taco Bell.

some plague rats posted:

stop trying to guilt people, no one gives a poo poo, you're being ridiculous. stop being like this

Sagebrush posted:

It's hard to figure out if Middle-earth has restaurants at all, because its level of technological and cultural development doesn't seem to directly correspond to a specific time in regular-earth history.

For instance, the Rohirrim and their wooden longhouses seem to roughly correspond to 10th-century Nordic tribesmen, while the architecture of Gondor and Minas Tirith resembles perhaps 14th century continental Europe, and parts of the Shire (e.g. the types of crockery we see in the hobbits' houses) are reminiscent of 18th century England. The Elves are ageless and live a totally non-industrialized hunter-gatherer lifestyle but with anachronistically advanced wood- and metalworking technology. The Dwarves would essentially have to have been industrialized to construct something like Khazad-Dum. The Orcs live like nomadic barbarians, though admittedly we haven't seen any who weren't part of an army. Nobody except the wizards seem to know about gunpowder, the development of which is a decent delineation between the Ancient World and the beginning of the Renaissance; we see Gandalf's fireworks being treated like magic, and the Uruk-Hai have the same reverence for their bomb, which I assume Saruman made for them.

So this makes it really difficult to decide if they have restaurants. In regular-earth history, you've got public houses and inns dating back to ancient Greece, but those were your sort of communal eating situation with everyone at one table sharing the pot au feu or whatever the host was cooking that night. The first instances of what we would really recognize as a modern restaurant were in 12th-century China, but that concept -- with a menu of dishes, patrons making orders to a kitchen, and waiters serving the food -- really didn't appear in Europe until the 18th century.

I personally find it hard to believe that the Orcs, being nomadic barbarians, would have had any concept of a menu, let alone have enough experience with restaurant dining to make "back on the menu" a recognizable expression. None of the other societies are likely to have developed restaurants either -- I suppose the Dwarves and Elves could have, but the Elves somehow seem like they don't use money or really have much interest in food either, and the Dwarves are secretive and have all died out. The hobbits, being apparently the most culturally modern society in Middle-earth and also the most food-focused, seem like the people who would invent and operate restaurants. Perhaps when the orc refers to the menu, it's simply our narrator Frodo showing his cultural bias, inserting a familiar expression from the Shire to reflect the tone of the orc's hungry threat.