1.) The dwarves spar as they journey, in the mornings or evenings, or sometimes when they break for the midday meal. Sometimes they divide into teams, sometimes it’s a massive free-for-all, and not even the brothers and family units among them will help one another. Sometimes one dwarf stands on a rock and the goal is to knock him down and take his place and defend it alone, other times they simply pile into each other and all may use the terrain however they please. Sometimes they all attack Thorin at once, and he holds them off with sword and axe, or sword and the oaken branch that gave him his name, or the sword alone, or barefisted, wrestling and biting and kicking. Sometimes they have one-on-one spars, or two-on-one or small groups against other small groups. No one seems to hold back at all. The company goes around with bruises, groaning as they ride the next day with wrenched muscles, ruefully let each other help staunch a bleeding wound.
“Someone’s going to get killed,” Bilbo had said with certainty after a week of watching this, but Gandalf only smiled.
He gained some perspective when, during an unarmed melee, Balin neatly sidestepped a punch from Dori that smashed the tree behind him to splinters. Because he’s seen dwarves take blows from Dori before, and they always leave bruises that last for days– but never more than that.
Fili wasn’t sparring that day– he was still recovering from the near-drowning– and thus was sharpening his swords next to Bilbo and keeping one eye on the proceedings, yelling out the occasional encouragement or taunt.
“What’re you gawping at there, Mister Baggins?”
“Ori’s never managed to raise a single bruise on any of you,” he said slowly. “What would happen if he struck me?”
“Don’t worry, Gandalf warned us all not to. You Shirelings are a soft little folk, hm? ‘–but they’ll surprise you, Master Dwarf,’ you know how he is.”
“Soft is what you call not having a harder skull than a tree, is it?”
“Couldn’t’ve been a very hard wood,” Fili snorted. “Half-dead, too. Dori’s pulling his punches. He has to, he’s stronger than Dwalin even.” He glanced over at Bilbo, who was still wide-eyed. “You said you’d read a good deal about elves. That you’d studied them. How would you describe ’em?”
“Describe elves? Well… fair, tall. Wise, immortal beings, the Firstborn of the Peoples of Middle-Earth–”
“Well, whether any of that’s true,” interrupted Fili with a bit of a grimace, “we were made by Mahal, not Illuvatar. And Mahal considered it rather more important than being tall, aye, or fair in the eyes of some, that dwarves be tough.”
Of all the things to be proud of, Bilbo thought. But then he supposed they had to be proud of something, if they knew they were not made to be fair or wise or tall or immortal– or given a land like the Shire, with the gifts and the knowledge to till it.
2.) Occasionally they stay at inns, in villages of Men that are apparently friendlier than others. Bilbo has no idea what kind of unseen sign marks them apart, but the dwarves recognize something about them as they pass and Gloin takes out his ledger and abacus and talks to Thorin and Balin and Dwalin in low tones before Thorin announces whether they will enter. Bifur and Bofur bring whatever toys they will have made since the last one, and sometimes a nicely inked scroll by Balin or Ori. Dori might contribute a knitted scarf or hat or mittens or foot-mittens (at which name Fili and Kili fall about laughing and even Gandalf’s mustache wobbles suspiciously). Thorin ties back his hair and disappears into the local forge for the evening. Nori just… disappears.
They share rooms, because there are fifteen of them, and no matter who he rooms with Bilbo has never seen a single dwarf sleep in a bed. The beds are right there, comfortable and inviting, and yet every single member of the company he has seen sleep— which is everyone except Gandalf— strips the sheets and blankets off their bed and carry them into a corner of the room to pile on the floor like a nest.
“Why do you do that?”
“Bad enough we’re on the second floor,” Gloin grumbled. "Sleep raised up off it? No thank you, laddie. We’re far enough away from stone as it is.”
3.) The metal pins go right through their ears! Holes! In their ears! That they punched with needles and let scar around bits of metal that were still in there! And he thought they looked far too regular for birthmarks but they’re self-inflicted, stabbed repeatedly with needles (again!) and stained with dyes that surely cannot be anything other than poisonous, to mark so permanently; what exactly is so wrong with the bodies they were born with?
4.) Bilbo is perfectly familiar with the practice of breaking apart chicken bones to get at the marrow inside. Healthy stuff, that, though you must be careful not to swallow bone splinters. At home, if they had no guests in front of whom good manners must be practiced, his mother would bite down on them rather than bothering to get out the claw crackers. His father would laugh and call her a barbarian.
But the dwarves crack open the bones of sheep with their teeth, crunch down on the leg bones of deer after the meat has been stripped from it. There’s “Mahal made us to be tough” and then there’s having the jaw strength of a pack of wolves, and apparently the table manners to match. It nearly puts him off his dinner.
5.) In full darkness, the dwarves’ eyes widen and gleam like cats’. In that first instant when they come into light again, if Bilbo looks quick enough, their eyes are black nearly edge-to-edge. He strongly dislikes the way it makes him feel like a prey animal among predators.
1.) SERIOUSLY HOW DOES HE WALK EVERYWHERE WITH BARE FEET. SHARP ROCKS. TWIGS. THORNS. SNOW. WHAT IN THE NAME OF MAHAL. GANDALF EXPLAIN YOUR BURGLAR.
Christianity and conservatism are not compatible ideologies. Conservatives, socially, are against refugees, against equality, and fiscally are against social programs and financial aid to those in need.
Jesus demanded they help refugees, demanded equality, and demanded aid to the poor.
To be conservative means to not be Christian, and to claim you are both is to be a hypocrite.
Something Jesus also condemned.
I don’t think you know much about either ideology
Sincerely, a conservative Christian
I’ve read the bible six times, I know what it says.
I’m also a polisci student, and pay attention to what conservatives do. In fact I’ve studied conservatism, in addition to the other political ideologies that exist in our world.
Jesus said:
When a foreigner resides among you in your land, do not mistreat
them. The foreigner residing among you must be treated as your
native-born. Love them as yourself, for you were foreigners in Egypt.
(Leviticus 19:33-34)
When you reap the harvest of your land, do not reap to the very
edges of your field or gather the gleanings of your harvest. Do not go
over your vineyard a second time or pick up the grapes that have fallen.
Leave them for the poor and the foreigner. (Leviticus 19:9-10)
He defends the cause of the fatherless and the widow, and loves the
foreigner residing among you, giving them food and clothing. And you are
to love those who are foreigners, for you yourselves were foreigners in
Egypt.(Deuteronomy 10:18-19)
For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and
you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, I
needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I
was in prison and you came to visit me. (Matthew 25:25-36)
Just to quote a very, very few.
Conservatives repeatedly repeal and cut back programs that feed the poor ,including poor children, cut back education, and cut back healthcare, all things vital to the poor. Conservatives repeatedly want no refugees, want no immigrants (travelers), including children. In fact, many conservatives want to throw the existing immagrants (travelers) out of the country (and need I remind you, Jesus was not a “legal” immagrant, so to claim ‘legal’ and ‘illegal’ immigrants are any different is still to ignore what the bible has commanded of you.
I know exactly what each ideology is about. You are a hypocrite, and not a Christian. You only call yourself one while flaunting what was commanded of you.
in the field of religious studies, we often call jesus one of the first radical leftists. he was a social anarchist with communist leanings, and that’s why his draw was such a threat to the imperial system—because he was calling for the dismantling of oppressive power structures. the conservative romans were the ones who killed jesus, and conservatives after are the ones continuing to kill his message thousands of years after his death.
Skill: Shows off the blacksmiths massive horse cock. In a time before modern machinery some crazy Germans and Swiss hammered beyond natural human limit. They probably did it as a meme then realised it was actually useful as a weapon. Sharpening a wavy blade would have been a nightmare.
Functional: Good for duelling sword vs sword. A traditional sword allows you to slide off an enemies blade if your swords clash, because the blade is straight. The waves in a flamberg blade creates vibrations which hurts the opponents hands, that doesn’t sound like much but it gives you an advantage. Very useful for parrying since the enemies sword will strike, then the blade gets stuck on your wavy blade or they pull away from the impact shock. Either way you will have an opening to attack. Also the waves cut much deeper similar to a serrated knife. If you got cut once by this blade, you would not be able to stitch your wound shut, you are pretty much sliced bread.
Aesthetic:Â Someone challenges you to a duel, while they unsheathe their boring longsword, you unwrap your wiggly sword. They immediately apologize and run because you are rich enough to afford a wiggly sword and probably have multiple wenches giving you ankle parchments.
IT Guy here. We (the IT and IT Security experts) continue to find that the more obtrusive a “turn off your ad-blocker” site tends to be, the *more likely it is* for that site to serve ads containing viruses or malware.
A great example of this is, I shit you not, Forbes.com. They refuse to let you see their content with an ad-blocker enabled, yet they do such a profoundly shitty job vetting their ads that their site has *repeatedly* served up Malware to end users. Yet they still demand your ad blocker be turned off or you subscribe to their content to see it.
Look, I get that content owners need to get paid. I think we can all agree on that. The problem is that until and unless ad networks are extensively vetted, and until and unless these site owners agree to compensate users infected with malware from their site for lost time or damages, then an ad blocker is more of a *LEGITIMATE SECURITY TOOL* than some mere banner ad blocker, more along the lines of your anti-virus suite or anti-malware scanner. I’d recommend anyone and everyone at home make use of ad blockers by default, to be honest, to protect yourselves.
So yeah. If a website calls you out on an ad blocker in anything beyond static images in place of ad blocks (like Reddit, Spiceworks, and Nexus Mods), then keep them blocked. More than likely, those cretins have served folks malware before, but they’d rather you unblock their dangerous ad networks instead of fixing the problem in the first place.
i was literally screaming about this last night
like holy shit get rid of your malware and i’ll turn off my adblocker you chucklefucks
I LEARNED RECENTLY THAT PLATO WON THE GOLD MEDAL IN THE OLYMPICS FOR WRESTLING THREE TIMES. THIS PUTS A NEW PERSPECTIVE ON THINGS. I ALWAYS IMAGINED PLATO TO BE FRAIL AND MISSHAPEN BUT HE MUST HAVE BEEN FRICKEN RIPPED. I WONDER IF ARISTOTLE EVER FELT ANXIETY ABOUT GETTING PHYSICALLY (I.E. NOT JUST METAPHYSICALLY) DISMANTLED BY PLATO. PLATO WAS PROBABLY PISSED OFF BY AT LEAST A HANDFUL OF QUESTIONS ARISTOTLE ASKED HIM. ARISTOTLE WAS A LITERAL GENIUS TOO. IMAGINE PLATO LECTURING AND WRITING ON A BLACKBOARD AND ARISTOTLE THROWING A COMMENT OUT THERE ABOUT SOME COMPLEX MISSTEP IN PLATO’S LOGIC AND PLATO’S CHALK JUST SNAPS AND ARISTOTLE’S TESTICLES SUCK WAY BACK UP TO WHERE THEY DROPPED FROM, THEN PLATO IN A BLUR APPEARS BESIDE ARISTOTLE SITTING AT HIS DESK AND HE PICKS HIM UP AND SUPLEXES HIS MACEDONIAN ASS.
given the content of a lot of Plato’s conclusions I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that Plato responded to a lot of reasonable criticisms with “Fight me” and that was the end of it.
We’re not actually sure whether Plato is his real name! Some people speculate that, because Platon means “broad” in Greek, this was actually his wrestling nick name. Basically, it’s like Dwayne Johnson became a famous philosopher and everyone still called him “The Rock”.
More and more I wish we kind of had time traveling capabilities.
Now I can’t stop thinking about Plato looking like The Rock
brown- deep eyes, full of stories, old soul, sipping tea, soft skin, vintage clothes, thrift shops, flannel shirts.
green- smoothies, splattered jeans, paintbrush in hand, art museums, road trips, pressed flowers.
I know the U.S. military is a piece of shit but I still want to enlist. My best friend is living with me right now and if I enlisted I don’t know what would happen to him. The last thing I want is for him to be back on the streets or with his parents but he’s an autistic trans man who can’t even drive……
ok so surprisingly, like this is actually a thing that is kinda debated a bit unofficially among people who talk about sword taxonomy.
it really comes down to how do you define a sword and a knife? so heres the thing.
a sword is typically known as a long blade used for combat. a knife is a short blade used as a tool or weapon. but at what point do you draw the line? with this sort of definition youve only reduced it down so far as a knife is a small sword and a sword is a big ole knife. so there isnt any meaningful differentiation. however logic dictates that the thing you slice butter with isnt a sword and the long blade that gandalf was swinging around arent nearly the same thing and thus in the case of extremes we can rule out technicality.
the main issue comes in when you run into certain examples that really blur the line. the seax for one is an example of whats known as a long knife. typically a heavy duty utility blade about 10 inches long, but some examples stretched well into 30 in long, well into what most would consider sword territory and were used as weapons, all of them however are called a seax.
all typical length seaxes, definitely knives
just as much a seax but clearly also a sword. the easy answer is that oh it can be either, but no one in academia likes easy answers or soft definitions and we still cant identify the length at which it stops being a knife and starts being a sword, so no one can decide really.
it gets worse from there.
the gross-messer, literally german for Long-Knife was a german weapon popular among mercenaries. this blade at first glance is obviously a sword
however it evolved from a blade that was only about 15 inches long and basically just a kind of all purpose knife that people started using to defend themselves and eventually someone got the bright idea of putting a crossguard on it, but the blade was still geometrically the same, even in width. it lacked the distal taper of a proper sword and was heavy and thick. so is it a long knife or a weird sword? in fact the ENTIRE PURPOSE of the elongation of the gross messer was to get around a law that kept common folk from owning SPECIFICALLY SWORDS, which were defined as having a certain typoe of way they were fixed to the hilt, which the gross messer circumvented by legally not counting as a sword despite clearly being one.
so jumping back to the crossguard, do we draw the line there? does a proper crossguard make it a sword? then what about all the swords with no crossguards, the yataghan, the seax, any of the numerous sabres, does that make them knives? what about all the knives that traditionally have crossguards? the bowie, or the kindjal? are they swords because they have crossguards despite being only 12 inches long?
what about the cutlass? an even MORE dubious classification.
all of these are cutlasses and the only thing they all have is common is a similar length and even then not by much. even the name cutlass itself derives from the french word coutelass that just means chopper which is just dubious as all hell.
some people say a sword has to have a double sided blade,(wrong ex, scimitar, saber, katana, etc etc) or a knife cant be a certain length or its a dagger, show me an example of how ur logic cant be disproved and ill gladly believe you.
bottom line on what constitutes a sword or a knife is….no one can fucking decide
