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HAPPY PRIDE MONTH 🏳️‍🌈

To all of us who’re just a mess ❤️🧡💛💚💙💜🤎

Oh boy, this is getting notes again!

Hi, everyone, enjoy the little cartoon, avoid the notes and yes, I still fully identify as queer c: 🏳️‍🌈

downside: going to have to include a picture of the Giza pyramids in the slides for the lecture
upside: i get to give people a crash course in why perspective matters in two frames, because

An image of the three pyramids (and three satellite pyramids) on the Giza plateau that looks exactly the same as you've always seen it: Menkaure's smaller pyramid and the three queen's pyramids are in the foreground, with Khafre's pyramid looming behind it. Behind Khafre's pyramid is Khufu's, a.k.a. the Great Pyramid, which looks slightly smaller than Khafre's in this image.ALT

followed by

Another photo of the pyramids of the Giza plateau. This time the pyramids are all shown from the same distance, so that the distance between them is clear as well as their relative size. It's now painfully obvious that Khufu's Great Pyramid on the far right is indeed the largest, with Khafre's in the centre only an increment smaller. Menkaure's pyramid, on the other hand, is less than half the height of Khafre's.ALT

is such a funny sequence

i find most people who haven't seen it in person don't know that cairo is RIGHT THERE

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I loved these perspectives so I took some of my own when I was in Cairo and yeah, they're literally just. Right there. Pass em on your way to work, nbd

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No, y'all don't even understand.

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There is literally a Pizza Hut across the street from the pyramids.

That Pizza Hut among other things is why Egyptologists laugh their asses off when we see another piece of media where the protagonists get "lost in the desert near the pyramids", because it's like... just turn around my dudes you're only a seven min walk away from the nearest fastfood shop

Yall don't know how much I adore all of this

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NO EXPECTATIONS  

Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (2018) 

Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Vers(2023)

A message from Anonymous
Can you tell me why Frodo is so important in lotr? Why can't someone else, anyone else, carry the ring to mordor?

but someone else could.

that’s the whole point of frodo—there is nothing special about him, he’s a hobbit, he’s short and likes stories, smokes pipeweed and makes mischief, he’s a young man like other young men, except for the singularly important fact that he is the one who volunteers. there is this terrible thing that must be done, the magnitude of which no one fully understands and can never understand before it is done, but frodo says me and frodo says I will.

(when boromir is thinking of how he can use the ring to defend gondor, when aragorn is thinking of how it brought down proud isildur, when elrond is holding council and gandalf is thinking of how twisted he would become, if he ever dared—)

but then there’s frodo, who desires nothing except what he has already left behind him, and says, I will take the Ring.

it is an offer made out of absolute innocence, utter sincerity. It is made without knowing what it will make of him—and frodo loses everything to the ring, he loses peace and himself and the shire, he loses the ability to be in the world. It’s cruel, the ring is cruel, it searches out every weakness you have and feeds on it, drinks you dry and fills you with its poison instead, the ring is so cruel.

and frodo picks it up willingly. for no other reason except that it has to be done.

(the ring warps boromir into a hopeless grasping dead thing, the power of the palantir turns denethor into an old man, jealous and suspicious, it bends even saruman, once the proudest of the istari, into a mechanised warlord, sitting in his fortress and bent over his perverse creations—all the best of intentions, laid waste)

but there’s a reason gollum exists in the narrative, which is to show—well, to show what frodo might have been. because even as frodo grows mistrustful and wearied, as the burden of this ring grows heavier and heavier, he is never gollum. he is gentle to gollum. he is afraid—god frodo is so afraid for 2/3 of these books he is so tired and afraid, but he keeps moving, he walks though it would pull him into the ground, because he asked for this, he said he would.

someone else could have carried the ring to mordor, I suppose. the idea of a martyr is not dependent on the particular flesh and blood person dying for some greater purpose. but such a thing has to be chosen, lifted onto your shoulders for the right reason, the truest reasons, and followed into the dark, though it would see you burnt through and bled out.

I will take the Ring, though I do not know the way.

y'know say what you want about tumblr (and I have), but this is still probably the simplest and most powerful distillation of the heart of the Lord of the Rings I’ve ever read. I think back to it all the time

its literally so fucking wild seeing people your age having kids on purpose now