This is possibly the only thing that Troy (2004) did kind of correctly. The architecture is full of nods to Hittite and New Kingdom Egyptian culture (look at the design of the temple of Apollo!), and the costuming also points to Hittite and Assyrian designs.
There's a ton of mystery surrounding the fall of Mycenaean civilization, but there's at least some general agreement that Troy was at least partially based on a real city (with a different name), and that they not only shared some gods/cults with Mycenae, but also might have been directly allied with Mycenaean kingdoms.
I don't think there's any reason to believe that there was no mixing of cultures between the Anatolian sphere and the Mycenaean sphere, considering that the entire Eastern Mediterranean was known to trade heavily (ESPECIALLY the sea focused Mycenaean's).
Ah this happened to me this weekend! Not the train explosion, but the winedbg flood. For me, it was because I had my proton and steam Linux runtime installations on an NTFS disk instead of something more Linux native.
This inn is heavily featured in the film "An Evening with Beverly Luff Linn". Great movie, and incredibly difficult to recommend because of how incredibly weird it is.
Lots of reasonable claims here, the fellowship is certainly an international menace. It's important in the political climate that Arda finds itself in to point out fallacies, even in rhetoric we agree with:
The natural habitat of Balrogs is certainly not the deepest darkest depths of a mountain. In fact, Durin's Bane is more or less a squatter living in the unexplored basement of the mountain. I doubt he's even ever paid taxes!
While certainly an enemy military (or militia), the fellowship doesn't directly cause any acts of terrorism in the borders of Mordor. The ring was honestly destroyed on accident, afterall, and the mess at Cirith Ungol was at worst a B&E without theft.
I'm about 90% sure that the last image is of Morgoth, not Sauron.
Firstly, Morgoth most famously wielded a mace (the original Grond) while Sauron didn't have any "famous" weapons. The mace here seems too featured to be coincidental. Second, the landscape seems to reflect what I would expect from a rendering of Angband rather than Mordor. Finally, the helmet appears more like Morgoth's iron crown than Sauron's film appearance (and a far cry from any of Sauron's descriptions in writings).
As other comments have pointed out, the name "Wormtongue" was just a nickname that those in Edoras called Gríma son of Gálmód. The name just officially stuck once Gandalf the White strolled on in and showed Théoden that Gríma was indeed a wormtongue
It depends, since all states manage their taxes differently. Usually it's done via determining ties from the foreign resident to the state in question (e.g. is the resident receiving mail, operating a business, or residing x days of the year in the state?), and taxing on that accordingly. My state doesn't collect income taxes, so I'm not well suited to speak on this topic.
The taxation part of this is a bit of an unfair point. The US allows for an exclusion of ~$150k in foreign earned income if the US citizen qualifies as a bonafide resident of a foreign nation. On top of that, the IRS lets you deduct any taxes paid to a foreign government dollar for dollar against owed US taxes, and since most other developed nations have a higher tax rate, this essentially wipes out your US tax obligations (federal only, some states will still apply taxes separately). The only people actually double paying taxes are the ultra rich, but they obviously don't pay taxes at all since that's for the poors
Obviously, the system is still stupid and overly complicated (why should I even file a return with the IRS when I don't owe anything?), but it's not as egregious as this video makes it out to be
This is an oft repeated factoid with lots of variations (my favorite is the tale that Tolkien's editor underlined "dwarves" and corrected it to "dwarfs" citing the OED. Upon seeing this correction, Tolkien allegedly replied "I wrote the OED, and I said dwarves"). This link seems to be a good resource in explaining the reality behind the difference: he was writing a lot very quickly, and made a mistake based in familiarity of plurals rather than philology or linguistics.
You are correct regarding the implication, but I think it's a bit different than that. The blade Merry uses to stab the witch king was from the barrow downs, and was enchanted to be able to harm the witch king. So it was less "oh duh she's not a man, problem solved" and more "his magic shield is busted, stab him quick!"
The witch king was absolutely not unkillable, just hard to kill. Eowyn slew him after Merry stabbed him in the leg with a barrow blade. There is no indication that, had Frodo and Sam failed, the witch king would have risen again.
So much amazing stuff in here (some of which I disagree with, but alas, my time in these lands is limited). I can't believe you left out the Hungarian translation of LoTR! The actual translation quality itself isn't anything special, but it was mostly done by Árpád Göncz who was President of Hungary from 1990-2000. I just think it's neat.
I like both of these ideas, but I think the lowercase sigma idea is probably closest to what Tolkien envisioned. Although it would be pretty funny seeing Tolkien get confused about video game logic when presented with the concept of flat world screen wrap. Try explaining integer over/underflow to a man who fought in WW1 and almost definitely never used a computer in his entire life
Pretty unrelated, but I do wonder what the mathematics are behind the elves taking the "straight road" from Middle Earth to Aman. I think it would start to ruin the mystique and magic of the Tolkien Legendarium, but it's still fun to think about.
The idea is that after Sauron convinced Ar-Pharazôn, the last king of Númenor, to attack the Valar, Ilúvatar drowned their ships, killed their soldiers, and then reshaped Arda to be a sphere rather than flat. The elves who remained Middle Earth still had the right to return to Aman once they became weary of the world, and so Cirdan would build ships able to sail the old straight road directly from the grey havens to Aman. I'm wondering what that mechanism would be that would allow the ships to go through "space" rather than simply wrap around the sphere of Arda. Maybe a portal? Or just like straight up they lift off the ocean and float through space with minimal thrust before reaching Aman? Given that the Arda is supposed to be Earth far far in the past, how would the Valar hide themselves from a space travel capable humanity?
Fun fact: the siege engine Grond was named for Morgoth's mace which he used in the first age to smite Fingolfin, the younger half brother of Fëanor (the crafter of the Silmarils), during 1 on 1 combat. In that battle, Fingolfin's final act of defiance to the first Dark Lord was to stab his foot, leaving Morgoth with a limp for the rest of his time on Arda. Interestingly, Morgoth never recovered from this injury, whereas he is stated to have recovered from other injuries to his physical form such as the attack of Thorondor the eagle as Fingolfin laid dying, and the betrayal of Ungoliant after the ruining of the two trees of Valinor. This is also the only time mentioned in Tolkien's writings when a Vala was injured by a child of Ilúvatar.
I have a similar use case with my PC and TV. My PC is across the house from the TV and is connected via an HDMI over Ethernet KVM for when I want to use my PC as a gaming console.
What I ended up doing was creating an automation in Home Assistant to turn on my KVM via a smart plug, then wake-on-lan my PC, and intiate a Steam Big Picture mode gamescope session. This was pretty tedious to get working all together, and startup time is pretty abysmal (around 1 minute to get fully into Steam), but it does actually work consistently.
In case anyone is interested in replicating my setup: I'm running NixOS 25.11 with the Jovian flake installed, and launching my session via the systemd service run_gamescope. If you're not on NixOS, you should still be able to build your own solution by emulating the Steam Deck startup services (honestly, it's not that complicated), or looking into projects like ChimeraOS.
One clarification: Sauron also commanded legions of Uruk-hai. It's undoubtedly true that Saruman did breed his Isengarder Uruks himself, but it's unclear whether or not these Isengarder Uruk's were the first man/orc hybrids, and furthermore it is unknown who developed the crossbreeding idea.
Uruk-hai is simply the black speech word, and Uruks is the English translation, so the existence (or lack thereof) of the -hai suffix is no indicator of origin for any individual Uruk, therefore I will omit it as I continue.
Uruks were first documented as the elite force of Sauron present in the siege and sacking of Osgiliath and Ithilien, which predates Saruman's use of them by approximately 1000 years. The strongest and stoutest orcs in the Mines of Moria are called Uruks, as are the orcs scene marching from Cirith Ungol as Sam and Frodo enter Mordor.
In true Tolkien fashion, it's left unclear whether or not the Uruks are man/orc hybrids or just very strong orcs. Treebeard speculates that they're hybrids (due to half the reasons present in the meme), but there's no definite answer. I'd like to believe that they are hybrids of some kind since it furthers the themes established earlier in the chronology of evil corrupting creation in new ways, but the grain of salt must still be acknowledged.
I'm of the opinion that Sauron, or possibly Morgoth (who famously had a knack for biology), developed the Uruks as an elite breed of soldiers. He then taught Saruman how to breed the Uruks to sow discord further west. The additional magics and technology is all Saruman though, since Sauron typically leaned on raw power after his fair form was destroyed.
TL;DR:
Saruman ain't original, he just copied Sauron's homework
I don't think that's correct. It seems like it originated from a magical context: something that puts a sexual "spell" on you
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexual_fetishism#History
This is possibly the only thing that Troy (2004) did kind of correctly. The architecture is full of nods to Hittite and New Kingdom Egyptian culture (look at the design of the temple of Apollo!), and the costuming also points to Hittite and Assyrian designs.
There's a ton of mystery surrounding the fall of Mycenaean civilization, but there's at least some general agreement that Troy was at least partially based on a real city (with a different name), and that they not only shared some gods/cults with Mycenae, but also might have been directly allied with Mycenaean kingdoms.
I don't think there's any reason to believe that there was no mixing of cultures between the Anatolian sphere and the Mycenaean sphere, considering that the entire Eastern Mediterranean was known to trade heavily (ESPECIALLY the sea focused Mycenaean's).
Ah this happened to me this weekend! Not the train explosion, but the winedbg flood. For me, it was because I had my proton and steam Linux runtime installations on an NTFS disk instead of something more Linux native.
This meme, but with the scouring of the shire
This inn is heavily featured in the film "An Evening with Beverly Luff Linn". Great movie, and incredibly difficult to recommend because of how incredibly weird it is.
Lots of reasonable claims here, the fellowship is certainly an international menace. It's important in the political climate that Arda finds itself in to point out fallacies, even in rhetoric we agree with:
I'm about 90% sure that the last image is of Morgoth, not Sauron.
Firstly, Morgoth most famously wielded a mace (the original Grond) while Sauron didn't have any "famous" weapons. The mace here seems too featured to be coincidental. Second, the landscape seems to reflect what I would expect from a rendering of Angband rather than Mordor. Finally, the helmet appears more like Morgoth's iron crown than Sauron's film appearance (and a far cry from any of Sauron's descriptions in writings).
As other comments have pointed out, the name "Wormtongue" was just a nickname that those in Edoras called Gríma son of Gálmód. The name just officially stuck once Gandalf the White strolled on in and showed Théoden that Gríma was indeed a wormtongue
It depends, since all states manage their taxes differently. Usually it's done via determining ties from the foreign resident to the state in question (e.g. is the resident receiving mail, operating a business, or residing x days of the year in the state?), and taxing on that accordingly. My state doesn't collect income taxes, so I'm not well suited to speak on this topic.
The taxation part of this is a bit of an unfair point. The US allows for an exclusion of ~$150k in foreign earned income if the US citizen qualifies as a bonafide resident of a foreign nation. On top of that, the IRS lets you deduct any taxes paid to a foreign government dollar for dollar against owed US taxes, and since most other developed nations have a higher tax rate, this essentially wipes out your US tax obligations (federal only, some states will still apply taxes separately). The only people actually double paying taxes are the ultra rich, but they obviously don't pay taxes at all since that's for the poors
Obviously, the system is still stupid and overly complicated (why should I even file a return with the IRS when I don't owe anything?), but it's not as egregious as this video makes it out to be
sigh I'll just put this here instead of writing it all over again: https://piefed.social/comment/10585049
This is an oft repeated factoid with lots of variations (my favorite is the tale that Tolkien's editor underlined "dwarves" and corrected it to "dwarfs" citing the OED. Upon seeing this correction, Tolkien allegedly replied "I wrote the OED, and I said dwarves"). This link seems to be a good resource in explaining the reality behind the difference: he was writing a lot very quickly, and made a mistake based in familiarity of plurals rather than philology or linguistics.
You are correct regarding the implication, but I think it's a bit different than that. The blade Merry uses to stab the witch king was from the barrow downs, and was enchanted to be able to harm the witch king. So it was less "oh duh she's not a man, problem solved" and more "his magic shield is busted, stab him quick!"
The witch king was absolutely not unkillable, just hard to kill. Eowyn slew him after Merry stabbed him in the leg with a barrow blade. There is no indication that, had Frodo and Sam failed, the witch king would have risen again.
So much amazing stuff in here (some of which I disagree with, but alas, my time in these lands is limited). I can't believe you left out the Hungarian translation of LoTR! The actual translation quality itself isn't anything special, but it was mostly done by Árpád Göncz who was President of Hungary from 1990-2000. I just think it's neat.
I like both of these ideas, but I think the lowercase sigma idea is probably closest to what Tolkien envisioned. Although it would be pretty funny seeing Tolkien get confused about video game logic when presented with the concept of flat world screen wrap. Try explaining integer over/underflow to a man who fought in WW1 and almost definitely never used a computer in his entire life
Pretty unrelated, but I do wonder what the mathematics are behind the elves taking the "straight road" from Middle Earth to Aman. I think it would start to ruin the mystique and magic of the Tolkien Legendarium, but it's still fun to think about.
The idea is that after Sauron convinced Ar-Pharazôn, the last king of Númenor, to attack the Valar, Ilúvatar drowned their ships, killed their soldiers, and then reshaped Arda to be a sphere rather than flat. The elves who remained Middle Earth still had the right to return to Aman once they became weary of the world, and so Cirdan would build ships able to sail the old straight road directly from the grey havens to Aman. I'm wondering what that mechanism would be that would allow the ships to go through "space" rather than simply wrap around the sphere of Arda. Maybe a portal? Or just like straight up they lift off the ocean and float through space with minimal thrust before reaching Aman? Given that the Arda is supposed to be Earth far far in the past, how would the Valar hide themselves from a space travel capable humanity?
GROND
Fun fact: the siege engine Grond was named for Morgoth's mace which he used in the first age to smite Fingolfin, the younger half brother of Fëanor (the crafter of the Silmarils), during 1 on 1 combat. In that battle, Fingolfin's final act of defiance to the first Dark Lord was to stab his foot, leaving Morgoth with a limp for the rest of his time on Arda. Interestingly, Morgoth never recovered from this injury, whereas he is stated to have recovered from other injuries to his physical form such as the attack of Thorondor the eagle as Fingolfin laid dying, and the betrayal of Ungoliant after the ruining of the two trees of Valinor. This is also the only time mentioned in Tolkien's writings when a Vala was injured by a child of Ilúvatar.
I have a similar use case with my PC and TV. My PC is across the house from the TV and is connected via an HDMI over Ethernet KVM for when I want to use my PC as a gaming console.
What I ended up doing was creating an automation in Home Assistant to turn on my KVM via a smart plug, then wake-on-lan my PC, and intiate a Steam Big Picture mode gamescope session. This was pretty tedious to get working all together, and startup time is pretty abysmal (around 1 minute to get fully into Steam), but it does actually work consistently.
In case anyone is interested in replicating my setup: I'm running NixOS 25.11 with the Jovian flake installed, and launching my session via the systemd service
run_gamescope. If you're not on NixOS, you should still be able to build your own solution by emulating the Steam Deck startup services (honestly, it's not that complicated), or looking into projects like ChimeraOS.One clarification: Sauron also commanded legions of Uruk-hai. It's undoubtedly true that Saruman did breed his Isengarder Uruks himself, but it's unclear whether or not these Isengarder Uruk's were the first man/orc hybrids, and furthermore it is unknown who developed the crossbreeding idea.
Uruk-hai is simply the black speech word, and Uruks is the English translation, so the existence (or lack thereof) of the -hai suffix is no indicator of origin for any individual Uruk, therefore I will omit it as I continue.
Uruks were first documented as the elite force of Sauron present in the siege and sacking of Osgiliath and Ithilien, which predates Saruman's use of them by approximately 1000 years. The strongest and stoutest orcs in the Mines of Moria are called Uruks, as are the orcs scene marching from Cirith Ungol as Sam and Frodo enter Mordor.
In true Tolkien fashion, it's left unclear whether or not the Uruks are man/orc hybrids or just very strong orcs. Treebeard speculates that they're hybrids (due to half the reasons present in the meme), but there's no definite answer. I'd like to believe that they are hybrids of some kind since it furthers the themes established earlier in the chronology of evil corrupting creation in new ways, but the grain of salt must still be acknowledged.
I'm of the opinion that Sauron, or possibly Morgoth (who famously had a knack for biology), developed the Uruks as an elite breed of soldiers. He then taught Saruman how to breed the Uruks to sow discord further west. The additional magics and technology is all Saruman though, since Sauron typically leaned on raw power after his fair form was destroyed.
TL;DR: Saruman ain't original, he just copied Sauron's homework