lindseybyrd - Tumblr blog

[lindseybyrd]

This is genuinely why you can't take reviews to heart sometimes.

A 1 star book review could be someone's 5 star.

You need to read the context and understand the impact. Not every book is for everyone, and those five star reviews can easily be someone else's one star too.

You just have to accept that opinions are opinions.

love when bad reviews read like glowing recommendations. "this story is about a girl getting manipulated and taken advantage of by toxic women" outta my way gayboy

[lindseybyrd]

sometimes the moral of the story really is just "you cannot go back and what happened to you is going to be with you for the rest of your life. but it's still going to be okay" huh

[lindseybyrd]

*sighs and rewires my neural pathways yet again*

[lindseybyrd]

A hiker, clearly shaken, enters a remote English village pub, his clothes all torn and he's full of scratches. 

"You won't believe this," he says to the bartender. "I was attacked by a leopard!"

"Really?"

"Yes! A leopard! In England!" The hiker sits down and orders the strongest liquor they've got. "I tried to run, but it was if course much faster than me."

The hiker gets his glass, empties it, and asks for another. "It sent me to the ground with a mighty push from its paws, but weirdly enough it then just gave me a really sad look and left."

"Ah, you met Father Andrews," the bartender says, matter-of-factly.

"What do you mean?" asks the tourist, confused.

"Father Andrews was our priest. A truly kind-hearted man, loved by all. His only goal in life was to serve his congregation as well as he could. So when he one day found a lamp with a genie, his very first wish was to be a loving shepherd to the community."

"That's nice "

"Absolutely, if only he hadn't been so prone to spoonerisms."

[lindseybyrd]

My work in progress in a nutshell

narratives about doomed love that aren’t romantic in nature. the love between siblings who understand each other the most but are growing apart no matter how much they try to come back to one another. the love between friends whose life paths pull them apart and they never see each other again, only remembering the face of a once kind childhood. the love for a hometown that year by year becomes less and less the one that raised you until you are a foreigner in your own backyard. there was no stopping it. the love was there and it mattered and you can never come back again.

[lindseybyrd]

THE LORD OF THE RINGS: The Return of the King dir. Peter Jackson

[lindseybyrd]

Need y’all to know that in the 1970’s a letter to the editor was published in Daily Telegraph where the author offhandedly used the phrase “Tolkien-like gloom” to describe an area with barren trees and JRRT himself wrote back an incensed rebuttal at the use of his name in a context that suggested anything negative about trees.

[lindseybyrd]

That’s it, the Professor is truly the King of Sass

[lindseybyrd]

There are so many interesting moments of foreshadow in this book already, especially since we're only at chapter two, but what really gets me here is that this is such a good timeline marker for where Frodo is on his eventual character development journey.

He is so firm and certain in this moment, because all he sees is evil and wicked deeds.

But throughout this series those deeds are challenged and contested and cast in a new light, a light that Frodo becomes increasingly more empathetic to as he realizes how close he is to becoming just like Gollum.

Just, really excellent "this is who I am now" to be compared to the Frodo of later.

[lindseybyrd]

Here's something curious:

We just had a whole chapter that discussed how hobbits give other people presents on their birthdays.

But Sméagol asks Déagol to give *him* the ring because it's *his* birthday and he wants it as a present.

Gandalf does say that they are of a hobbit-kind, and perhaps this implies they are not true hobbits, or perhaps also their culture of hobbit does not practices this birthday tradition.

(Or maybe in the years after this event it became seen as unlucky to give the birthday person a present and the reverse started happening from there on out...)

But I am curious about this swap in birthday tradition.

[lindseybyrd]

Interestingly, this is the second time butter has been used to describe a hobbit thing.

First is Bilbo's too little butter over too much bread

and now hobbitlore: soft as butter

Hobbits = Butter

[lindseybyrd]

T_T

Words that hit home so hard

[lindseybyrd]

You know, now that I think about it, I don't think Sam and Frodo ever met the Ents.

That's kind of sad (and funny) at the same time

[lindseybyrd]

I confess, of all the LOTR poems, this one might be my favorite.

[lindseybyrd]

This line is so amusing in light of the prologue.

We just had a WHOLE PROLOGUE explaining how many many many people read his book. How it was translated, retranslated, added to. how it had annexes written and was preserved in iterations and copies in multiple libraries around the world.

Gandalf, you fool.

[lindseybyrd]

I always really liked this analogy.

Of course Ian Holmes' delivery in the movies was a beautiful one, and it added to the gravitas of the line itself, but beyond that there's a kind of certain knowingness to this line.

Like too little butter over too much bread. We've all been there. And we've all tried to stretch that last bit of butter, farther and farther.

To associate it with age? And that feeling of stretching yourself out like that?

Beautiful.

[lindseybyrd]

I too like short and obvious speeches, can't go wrong with that!