Quoted from a facebook post by user Elraen:
I’ve threatened this digital essay for some time, and now I feel like my timeline could use some nerdom, so the moment has come: it’s time for my full defense of Frodo. 😉
I remember when I was younger, I struggled to accept and understand why a lot of my peers found Frodo either forgettable or material for mocking. I understand it a little better now: the movies DO often make him not particularly likable or watchable. The book portrays him as someone who doesn’t seem to be experiencing a reasonable range of human expression/emotion, which admittedly can make him less compelling to read about. I understand that. But I also think it’s integral to the point of the character.
Frodo and Sam are necessary for understanding each other. Sam was a character cast from the mold that Tolkien learned on the frontlines of World War I. Tolkien saw Sam as the everyday hero, the embodiment of the simple good-hearted courage of the men he watched die in the trenches. Sam’s obstacles are exterior to himself: the geography. The threat of enemy soldiers (orcs), of Shelob, of his companion's physical and mental difficulties.
By contrast, Frodo’s obstacles are primarily internal. He endured a lot of those same exterior challenges as Sam, but Sam did much to absorb their impact (see the Cirith Ungol rescue). Frodo’s challenges are the slow, steady erosion of a soul being asked to carry a tremendous internal darkness without being consumed by it. Everything he was became laser-focused on that monolithic spiritual and emotional task.
This is why, at the end, Frodo had to sacrifice far more than Sam. Because Sam’s primary struggle was against external forces, once those external forces were alleviated, he could go home, marry, have children, live as a functional member of his community. For Frodo, the cessation of exterior pressure could do nothing to mend the way his soul had been burning from the inside out.
This is a hard thing to portray in movie form (the greatest weakness of the LotR movies is their inability to portray subtlety and spirituality, two traits the narrative Tolkien crafted requires). We see Frodo’s neck chapping from the actual physical weight of the Ring as a representation; well and good. But it’s hard to truly convey the immense mental weight, the crucible of enduring without utter collapse.
If Sam is a kind of patron saint for the good-hearted soldier, I would posit that Frodo is the patron saint of the depressed, the suicidal, the addicted, the ones living with trauma. We see it best maybe at Mount Doom, where Frodo’s very self has been ground down to nearly nothing: “No taste of food, no feel of water, no sound of wind, no memory of tree or grass or flower, no image of moon or star are left to me. I am naked in the dark, Sam, and there is no veil between me and the wheel of fire. I begin to see it even with my waking eyes, and all else fades.”
If you’d ever been deeply depressed, ever lived chained in the prison of PTSD, you will have experienced that exact same thing.
And of course that’s not always the most likable thing to read about or to watch. Mental anguish has a way of stripping away so many of the human details about you, even your personality itself.
"Frodo is a study of a hobbit broken by a burden of fear and horror— broken down, and in the end made into something quite different,” J.R.R. Tolkien himself wrote.
In another letter (#246, for the curious), Tolkien addressed the concern that had been posed to him that Frodo was a weak and failed hero, that his decision at Mount Doom proved it. “I do not think that Frodo's was a moral failure,” Tolkien clarified. “At the last moment the pressure of the Ring would reach its maximum– impossible, I should have said, for any one to resist, certainly after long possession, months of increasing torment, and when starved and exhausted… I do not myself see that the breaking of his mind and will under demonic pressure after torment was any more a moral failure than the breaking of his body would have been– say, by being strangled by Gollum, or crushed by a falling rock.”
Tolkien built into Frodo a validation of the internal struggle, marking it not as weakness, but ultimately even as a special kind of strength. Through the character of Frodo, Tolkien displayed that internal anguish, fear, and pain were not moral failings. He might not have known it, but Tolkien was building an incredibly beautiful fictitious case study on the impact of trauma on the soul and the human ability to endure.
“Frodo undertook his quest out of love– to save the world he knew from disaster at his own expense, if he could; and also in complete humility, acknowledging that he was wholly inadequate to the task,” Tolkien summarized. “His real contract was only to do what he could, to try to find a way, and to go as far on the road as his strength of mind and body allowed. He did that.”
And for any of us carrying a weight of horror, trauma, grief, dread, anxiety, depression, despair— maybe our hope is the same. To do what we can. To know that, even when our minds give out under the tremendous weight, we are still enough.
Mary Nikkel - I’ve threatened this digital essay for some...
I’ve threatened this digital essay for some time, and now I feel like my timeline could use some nerdom, so the moment has come: it’s time for my full...www.facebook.com
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Minor Caching Issue
I was notified of a little glitch causing some pages to show the admin view and excess two-factor prompts. This appears to have been a server caching issue. This would not have exposed any data or granted any special access, it was just a static cache of content being shown instead of sending it to the server code to save time.
The caching was only supposed to impact image files, but it looks like it somehow grabbed some page files too.
As server performance is now much better than it was when I implemented caching, and the performance difference is now negligble, I have opted to turn off caching for the time being.
If you experienced this problem, it should go away with just a refresh of the page.
You want a great debate to fall into?
Start debating someone on logical fallacies and what falls under what fallacy... the conversation is interesting to say the least lol
@milquetoast :milquetoast: This!
But in this case we were debating on exact definitions of appeal to authority, and it devolved a little because I gave the example "Are you a doctor? Because Dr. Phil says..." and they called it Ad Hominem...
We settled on it depends on the context of said statement, but it's ultimately appeal to authority in both cases, just in some contexts it's also ad hominem
Random thought of a brighter aspect of the #ai future:
We're not too far off from AI video editing, and imagine writing out a list of all your triggers, loading it into an AI, and then having it edited movies and tv shows to remove all triggering content.
Outage - Database Stuck
... I can't get 1 day without issues apparently...
When I was asleep, it looks like the database got stuck in some sort of optimize process with everything stuck waiting on that.
Restarting the database server forced that process to clear and cleaned things up.
I suspect what happened was I got overzealous after things started working great and I set the background worker count too high (these workers automatically run in the background doing things like updating contacts, downloading posts, etc).
I tuned that setting down, and increased the number of connections the database allows.
A quick test...
It's working partially.
I can post TO Tumblr, and Tumblr can see my comments, but Friendica isn't can't see the comments made to the post on Tumblr lol.
@skye 🏳️⚧️ he/him @hadeantaiga Friendica connects to Tumblr as a puppet account, so none of it is on the fediverse but just in the same feed.
I suppose they probably didn't connect the comments because that would get weird with a whole lot of comments being only visible to you (a whole of context management to figure out if you're replying via tumblr or AP, and whether or not the person you're talking to can see the relevant tumblr or AP comment)
It does offer a quick button to get to the original post immediately though, which is helpful (for Friendica users, the top right little arrow beside the network icon).
I think the feature mostly works to let you post and not worry about leaving a chunk of your audience out. Though I imagine it could use some work and if you have ideas they're always listening on the github: https://github.com/friendica/friendica/issues
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Introduction post!
Hello! My name is Eli, I'm a transmasc butch from Tumblr. I'm slowly poking my way around the Fediverse and I'm looking for an interface that lets me do long-form blogging. Friendica is allegedly good for that, so here I am!
Grad student, certified "Moon Nerd".
Nonbinary butch transmasc. Masculine like a misty mountain forest, queer as in fuck you. Converting to Judaism slowly but surely.
Interests:
Games: #Pathfinder #DnD #DragonAge #DiscoElysium #TheSims #CivilizationIV
TV: #Trigun #StarTrek #OurFlagMeansDeath #YouTubeVideoEssays
Books: #SherlockHolmes #TheExpanse #LordOfTheRings #TheHungerGames #SciFi #Fantasy
@hadeantaiga Welcome to the server/fediverse! And welcome as a fellow trans jewish convert!
I'm more than happy to answer any questions you may have with Friendica and to help you figure out if it's the right place for you... but if you go somewhere else please link because you definitely have me interested in your introduction!
Also what's your Tumblr, Friendica supports following Tumblr feeds, and this spurred me on to finally setting up the Tumblr addon which allows crossposting to Tumblr (it does require access to your Tumblr to do so, but uses Oauth so doesn't have your password or control over your account, just the ability to post).
@hadeantaiga friendica's upside is connecting to everything that allows it to connect, downside is that it's a little less user friendly.
Followed your tumblr!
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Matthew Kay
in reply to Shiri Bailem • • •