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SHISHKABOB posted:Yeah can you summarize it though. God: bad guy or good guy?
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Sep 16, 2022 14:55
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Shibawanko posted:theres a bit in stanislaw lem's star diaries where evil is defined as a partial knowledge of god, but which thinks of itself as full knowledge you mean like Man: "Death and suffering is bad and should be avoided" God: "Yeah but you're taking all that death and suffering out of context, if you knew what I know you'd realize it's a good thing" ? Or like 
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Sep 16, 2022 14:58
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Gettin' all Gnostic in here.
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Sep 16, 2022 15:35
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I don't think evil is necessary to Iluvatar's creation, it's more that he is so wise and powerful that even evil is subverted and incorporated into his plan. Arguably things would be even better if Melkor had stayed good, but given that he didn't Iluvatar still incorporates it into the song in a way that ultimately enhances it. Evil can only succeed if it has good qualities mixed in, but good doesn't need evil at all.
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Sep 16, 2022 16:09
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'Anduril', Thiel you motherfucker. 
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Sep 16, 2022 16:41
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This company should be called Cirith Ungol if it's going for the Watch Tower vibe
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Sep 16, 2022 17:00
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Genuinely surprised the tolkien estate hasn't sued. That poo poo is still under copyright.
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Sep 16, 2022 17:04
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:Genuinely surprised the tolkien estate hasn't sued. That poo poo is still under copyright. Palantir's been around for awhile and I don't recall any cease and desists.
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Sep 16, 2022 17:14
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IMNAL but I think the main thing about trademarks in this sort of thing is whether the average person could possibly confuse your thing with the other trademarked thing. Considering one 'product' is a fictional sword from a fantasy novel while their product is a fascist cyberpunk dystopia-enabling AI webcam, not likely to be confused.
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Sep 16, 2022 17:21
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So... GoFundMe to provide scoped, night-vision hi-powered rifles to migrants to take those things out?
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Sep 16, 2022 17:37
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i think melkor exists because otherwise nothing would really happen. after the valar are done with the world at first it's just this boring symmetrical place with an island in the middle and two lamps at either end, like a bad simcity. melkor introdudes the flow of time, entropy and destruction which are necessary elements for there to be anything at all, but he still sucks as a guy
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Sep 16, 2022 17:55
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Imagined posted:IMNAL but I think the main thing about trademarks in this sort of thing is whether the average person could possibly confuse your thing with the other trademarked thing. Considering one 'product' is a fictional sword from a fantasy novel while their product is a fascist cyberpunk dystopia-enabling AI webcam, not likely to be confused.
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Sep 16, 2022 18:01
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Shibawanko posted:i think melkor exists because otherwise nothing would really happen. after the valar are done with the world at first it's just this boring symmetrical place with an island in the middle and two lamps at either end, like a bad simcity. melkor introdudes the flow of time, entropy and destruction which are necessary elements for there to be anything at all, but he still sucks as a guy Everything is to Illuvatar's design so it's more or less the same dillema as asking why if there's a god in real life are there kids with cancer and stuff like that
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Sep 16, 2022 18:04
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Tolkien literally wrote books worth of discussion on this very question later in his life you can go read them.
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Sep 16, 2022 18:09
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Yeah I mean, Wheel of Time was more explicit about it even, it showed an alternate reality where evil did not exist, and everyone was just a soulless perpetually smiling robot wandering around in a daze. The way I understand it is as I said, you need there to be hardship and sorrow and mediocrity in the world or else the wondrous and euphoric moments carry no weight. You need adversity in order to experience triumph, and without triumph life is meaningless. e: sorry, this is balrog-wings-level stuff, my bad for bringing it up
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Sep 16, 2022 18:11
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Data Graham posted:e: sorry, this is balrog-wings-level stuff, my bad for bringing it up The balrog has wings?
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Sep 16, 2022 18:17
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Data Graham posted:Yeah I mean, Wheel of Time was more explicit about it even, it showed an alternate reality where evil did not exist, and everyone was just a soulless perpetually smiling robot wandering around in a daze. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTMxjADudbc
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Sep 16, 2022 18:20
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https://sasslantis.ee/lyrics-the_beavis_and_butthead-i_am_hell Butt-head posted:See, it's like, you need stuff that sucks to have stuff that's cool.
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Sep 16, 2022 18:25
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Data Graham posted:Yeah I mean, Wheel of Time was more explicit about it even, it showed an alternate reality where evil did not exist, and everyone was just a soulless perpetually smiling robot wandering around in a daze. To me it's more "Is there any way to eliminate evil from the world without eliminating choice/free will?" If you give up the capacity to choose evil you pretty much give up the capacity to be an actual person instead of some kind of pre-programmed robot doll.
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Sep 16, 2022 18:53
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Theodicy is a classic problem, and Tolkien just straight up put it in his fantasy setting where God is a character, and had his other characters have opinions about theodicy in it.
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Sep 16, 2022 18:58
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Take some psylocibin and really feel the truth of non-dualism and the oneness of all things. Good and evil only exist as human definitions because of the way the meat in our head classifies things --- our philosophies have no external reality. From a universal ("god") perspective good and evil are part of a single whole, as is everything else. It's like saying "I prefer cold to heat. That's nicer for me. So why did God make heat?" 
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Sep 16, 2022 20:29
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Lol I had this on tape when I was a kid and it's so burned into my memory that it's the first thing that pops into my head anytime this topic comes up 
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Sep 16, 2022 22:52
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"The Elves will steal our jobs"...this show has hit bottom tier. I received one of Tom Shippey's books today and I rather read 200 pages about linguistics in LOTR than watch another episode. Interesting. While I don't agree with your conclusion I will check if some additional meaning got lost in translation. "And so it came to pass" translates to "Und so geschah es" in my language, which (in German) does not imply causality from previous events. I will look into this. Hammerstein fucked around with this message at 01:45 on Sep 17, 2022 |
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Sep 17, 2022 01:38
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On another note, here's a question that seems completely stupid and obvious whenever I think of it but the longer I think about it and the drunker I get on a Friday the more I wonder how clear it's ever seemed. What era of English history was Tolkien fetishizing exactly, anyway? I want to say it seems like he's all about the Saxon kingdoms, Wessex, Northumbria, those guys, prior to the Danish incursions and their language. His affinity for stuff like Beowulf and the Anglo-Saxon poetic and mythic traditions, and even his peculiar handwriting (which looks a lot like tengwar) which seems to have been adapted straight from Old English expressions of Latin, make it seem like Old English is his main thing. Éala Earendel engla beorhtast and all that. But isn't it more his thing to try to capture an older "English" culture, the pre-Saxon Britannic traditions? Especially back in the "Kortirion Among the Trees" days. It's all about faeries in mounds and standing stones and stuff like that, way older than Anglo-Saxon or even Roman influences. But then there's hardly any of that kind of linguistic presence in his stuff; it seems like his patterns of thought and writing feel rooted in later soil, though never as late as anything like Anglo-Norman or Middle English. Obviously the history of the British Isles is a long series of "native" cultures being displaced and supplanted by a series of invaders and conquerors, and nobody would have been more aware of that than Tolkien. But trying to glean a sense from his influences of what he thought of as "his" mythic England is a weirdly slippery thing to get a hold of. I liked that post someone did many pages ago about how Lord of the Rings is a linguistic tour backwards through English history: starting out in early modern lords-and-tenants feudalism in the Shire, to medieval Rivendell and Lorien, then Anglo-Saxon Rohan, then Roman Gondor. Still, LotR feels like too late in his thought process to glean at what point in that continuum his real passion lay.
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Sep 17, 2022 02:02
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Hammerstein posted:"The Elves will steal our jobs"...this show has hit bottom tier. Wait, really? Who says that?
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Sep 17, 2022 04:44
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OctaviusBeaver posted:Wait, really? Who says that? Numenorean Matt Berry.
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Sep 17, 2022 04:46
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The poster is paraphrasing rather than quoting, but a random Númenorean is out there stirring up a mob using familiar xenophobic rhetoric.
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Sep 17, 2022 04:47
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Data Graham posted:I liked that post someone did many pages ago about how Lord of the Rings is a linguistic tour backwards through English history: starting out in early modern lords-and-tenants feudalism in the Shire, to medieval Rivendell and Lorien, then Anglo-Saxon Rohan, then Roman Gondor. Still, LotR feels like too late in his thought process to glean at what point in that continuum his real passion lay. This'll come off as simplistic and it is, but Tolkien's "true passion" was world-building - at least in terms of the specific world of Middle Earth. I haven't read Tolkien as widely as some in this thread, but the feeling I got was that he really wasn't that interested in telling a story in Middle Earth. He wanted to relate a history and a geography and a mythology. He'd have much rather taught Middle Earth classes in language, history, etc. than to have written a best-selling fantasy book.
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Sep 17, 2022 04:54
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Bongo Bill posted:The poster is paraphrasing rather than quoting, but a random Númenorean is out there stirring up a mob using familiar xenophobic rhetoric. He's not even random. He was talking with Pharazon when Galadriel and Halbrand first show up at court in Numenor, obviously also the guy Halbrand beat up. So they are probably working together to rile everyone up to help him cement his power.
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Sep 17, 2022 05:22
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I mean, sure, he's a recurring character who's got more going on than it at first appears, but you gotta admit he's pretty random.
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Sep 17, 2022 05:23
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Bongo Bill posted:The poster is paraphrasing rather than quoting, but a random Númenorean is out there stirring up a mob using familiar xenophobic rhetoric. Yes, although the bit about how the
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Sep 17, 2022 05:27
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BetterLekNextTime posted:Yes, although the bit about how the A reminder that humans are hella superstitious and ignorant about elves, as well as connecting Númenorean hatred of elves to Galadriel's hatred of Sauron, based on the time she quoted Zack Snyder's Justice League about what evil does and does not do. I also find myself thinking about the recurring motif of preparing speeches before writing them. Elrond writing Gil-Galad's speech and contemplating a simile, then Sadoc workshopping his lines, and now Miriel's voiceover starting with a line from a previous episode and continuing to become her addressing the assembly.
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Sep 17, 2022 05:41
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OctaviusBeaver posted:Wait, really? Who says that? Unfortunately it's true:  My brain trying to compile that scene: 
Hammerstein fucked around with this message at 10:29 on Sep 17, 2022 |
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Sep 17, 2022 10:01
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"Day'll take er jerbs!!!"
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Sep 17, 2022 14:13
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Hammerstein posted:Unfortunately it's true: I finished listening to The Silmarillion and started the audiobook over from the beginning, so this is funny to me because "The Valar convinced you to leave Middle-earth so that Men can replace you there" is one of the lies Melkor tells people once he's on probation. I guess if it worked once, run the same play again, just swap the names around.
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Sep 17, 2022 16:44
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People are people no matter what shape their ears are
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Sep 17, 2022 18:10
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Elvish innovators will disrupt the guild industry.Data Graham posted:On another note, here's a question that seems completely stupid and obvious whenever I think of it but the longer I think about it and the drunker I get on a Friday the more I wonder how clear it's ever seemed. I'm not sure he was attached to a specific era so much as he had his own complexes and longing for a truly English mythic identity, that for all the reason you cited he couldn't find in real history. YaketySass fucked around with this message at 19:32 on Sep 17, 2022 |
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Sep 17, 2022 19:27
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The reason they can't imitate Tolkien is because they aren't from that generation. Tolkien spoke Gothic and Latin and Old English, he actually understood other cultures and could write from other perspectives. We don't really teach history or ancient languages any more, so it makes sense that the only thing they can write is a reskinned 2016 USA. Their minds don't encompass anything else. If it happened before Twitter then it doesn't exist as far as the writers are concerned. That's why the elves wear identical uniforms and bitch about army rules, because what soldiers do now and that's all the writers know. That's why Galadriel is a loose cannon cop, because they have nothing to draw from except American pop culture.
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Sep 17, 2022 19:32
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That type of politics is not exclusive to the USA
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Sep 17, 2022 20:01
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OctaviusBeaver posted:The reason they can't imitate Tolkien is because they aren't from that generation. Tolkien spoke Gothic and Latin and Old English, he actually understood other cultures and could write from other perspectives. We don't really teach history or ancient languages any more, so it makes sense that the only thing they can write is a reskinned 2016 USA. Their minds don't encompass anything else. If it happened before Twitter then it doesn't exist as far as the writers are concerned. That's why the elves wear identical uniforms and bitch about army rules, because what soldiers do now and that's all the writers know. That's why Galadriel is a loose cannon cop, because they have nothing to draw from except American pop culture. yeah that's the big thing that's missing, the sense that the elves and numenor and all of these cultures are really foreign, in their general outlook as immortals or mortals or just because of their history. it looks flashy but everything feels strangely modern and on the nose this promotional shot of pharazon just looks so odd, like they're all parks & recreation actors that walked into the wrong dressing room:  there's a sense of remoteness that's essential to make the story work that's completely missing the lady on the right specifically looks like she serves coffee at starbucks
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Sep 17, 2022 20:05
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