Happy “today is 3 minutes longer” to those who celebrate.

The Beavers Yule✨🎄 Created for my agency’s monthly art prompt~ I’m traveling back to Savannah this weekend to spend the holidays with my family and I’ll be baking a yule log cake myself ☃️ . #kidlitart #illustration

I love the snow, but I always miss CA this time of year. Christmas isn't the same without lights on palm trees.

1. The Gnomish Lexicon has a word for lawyer. Gnomish would become Sindarin; there is no equivalent Qenya or Quenya word. 2. "War crime" is a meaningless concept applied to actions in the First Age, since war crimes are a construct of international law that Elves don't have.

Everyone stop, this is important

It remains my firm headcanon that Pharazon looks like Luthien.

Someday I'll come up with an OC for Elf Chomsky. In the meantime, have some Optimality Theory in Aman: archiveofourown.org/works/279233...

The other thing with this is that the versions of Quenya and Sindarin that we have are both as they are spoken in Third Age Western Middle-earth. I would never write the dialect of Sindarin the First Age Noldor used, because we *do not know* nearly enough about it to even guess at what's correct.

I am a hypocrite here because I have literally written characters having a conversation in my conlang of Tolkien's conlangs and expected the reader to more or less understand it.

One reason why bsky is nice for random Silm thoughts is that I can post things publicly here that I do want to talk/lecture about but where, if I posted them on tumblr, there'd be the strong possibility of hurting people's feelings. I like talking about writing choices! I don't like hurting feelings

I wish I didn't have such a strong negative reaction to how the Silm fandom uses thee/thou. Another fic I was enjoying, but the frequent use of it takes me out every time. It's something that *breaks* immersion for me.

cryptids

talking about Beren and Lúthien next time on @bythebywater.bsky.social (and since it’s October I drew their scary forms)

Favorite sign today:

There’s also the chaos option of marking long vowels by doubling the letter: don’t Findekaano and Findaraato look nice? I very much support not using diareses, which are completely unnecessary and only a transliteration convention.

OTW is a dysfunctional disaster, but I am beyond glad that AO3 exists and that (english fic-writing) fandom is no longer dependent on small ma'n'pa archives.

Something I've been drawing today. I woke up this morning with the thought of it in my head, and wanted to see if I could make it work.

It's funny, the longer I've been in fandom and reading fanfic, the more I prefer using just the Silm names. If I ever wrote Age of the Trees fic (I won't), I'd 100% go with the characters' Sindarin names (for those that have Sindarin names, obviously I wouldn't Sindarinize, say, Anaire's name)

I remain so fascinated by Eregion having a large Iathrin population (doriath diaspora?) and what you could do with that. Especially with the coup!

Illustration of the Silurian Period based on fossils in Scotland. The first animals to live on land were tiny arthropods, escaping predators and eating food in fields of cooksonia plants. Art from my new book DINOSAURS preorder here: a.co/d/fGVwsX0 #sciart #paleoart #evolution #fossiladdict

A newly discovered Devonian trackway in Poland reveals lungfish ancestors testing land mobility 10 million years before the first known tetrapod traces. phys.org/news/2025-08... #fossils #paleontology

Day 10: Dachshunds. An incredible commission I got to do recently, painting a card for 6 dachshunds' 10th birthday party. 🎂🎉 #doggust #doggust2025

Stuck on the next chapter of fuck monastery and what C's punishment should entail. I set it up so it would involve a count of some sort, which worked for my initial idea (needleplay) but I'm not actually that into needleplay and don't really know how to write it.

Bigfin squids (genus Magnapinna) have a reputation for being these almost eldritch creatures because of some low resolution photos, but I think they are quite beautiful, spaghetti arms and all.

ffs, shipweeks are not the place for platonic gen content

We only rate dogs. This is the goth cousin of Mike Wazowski from Monsters Inc. Please understand it's not just a phase, and only send dogs. Thank you… 12/10 (credit u/vincidelaunc)

Silvergifting week - Romance

Daily bunny no.3035 is out catching fireflies

Behold, new (old) fic. Includes a Shall These Bones Live outtake. archiveofourown.org/works/279233...

We don’t talk enough about how pretty Sarati is!

Sometimes I think about how Maedhros giving Fingon the elessar as a wedding gift means that Fingon married Maedhros’s kid

Be normal about mothers: silm fandom challenge,…. I’d say failed, but that implies there was ever a possibility of success.

I got the sweetest handwritten card from the parent of a patient today and that is worth a thousand kudos on ao3 🥹

A narnia atlas! What could have been!

hi

I spit out my drink infotel.ca/newsitem/mam...

Found ~4500 words of fuck monastery porn i'd cut from the last chapter. Debating posting it on tumblr, since i don't see myself repurposing it in a proper fic. cons: not actually that great, somewhat fragmentary pro: contains a reference to being fisted by pengolodh's slender elegant scribe's hand

my politics be like

Happy father's day to elrond <3

New Radiodont just dropped. Mosura fentoni. #paleoart #sciart #art #arthropod #cambrian

Pour les francophones un petit article sur la terrestrialisation des plantes pour ce #FossilFriday 🌿⛏️ lejournal.cnrs.fr/articles/pla... #paleobotany #fossil

I'm actually broadly uncomfortable with how much nerds have won the culture war against normies, as a nerd. I preferred it when we were getting bullied a little bit.

The Known Regions of Octopolis 🐙🦑🐡

Do I dare venture to the garden store today?

One thing I'll never post on tumblr and will probably regret here, but re: one of the day's discourses: I thought I was ace as a teen. Then took celexa and nope! I was depressed. Sexual awakening thanks to an SSRI.

...I should probably not try to grow or eat rue just because the Romans cooked with it and I think their cuisine is genuinely great and I am curious what rue would add to dishes that I've previously left it out of.

Thinking about when I saw the first draft of Mount Doom, the chapter, where Sam and Frodo struggle on together without hope, and how Tolkien's tears stained the page.

Part of the reason I dislike RoP's version of C is that ROP!C is old and not that attractive and has terrible fashion sense. And that's fine, actually. I dislike for many more reasons, of course, but it's fine to want your favorites to be hot!

On occasion I get jealous of Europe for its hedgehogs, but then I remember we have skunks!