ha! no, it’s literally 888.

The oldest use that the Oxford English Dictionary gives for less with a countable noun is a quotation from 888 by Alfred the Great

another thing to consider, they didnt often have the boss watching them while they worked. yes, the endless chores had to be done every god damned day, but your time was yours to manage to a large extent. want to pop off and chat with your neighbor for an hour in the middle of the day? who’s gonna stop you? who’s gonna look at your timesheet? what timesheet?

yes, let’s submit our language to the arbitrary opinions of some long dead english gentry idiot, why dont we. never mind how people have actually used the words for literal centuries at this point, we must uphold the bigoted idiocy of the english upper classes!

:|

well, in-universe, the stories are elven lore handed down to us through numenorean transmission. so anything the elves didnt know about or understand is gonna be vague.

she’s not an exception. there are many (unnamed) ainur, and many of them spend time without a fana (the seeming-body that unfallen ainur wear when they want to be like people). maybe some of them never (or only very rarely) put it on.

trying to wean europeans off their endemic alcoholism is whatever, i doubt you’ll achieve much, and this is probably not the way to do it, but at least it’s not a terrible idea in theory.

but i love this british practice of labelling socializing as “anti-social behavior”.

reminds me of another british article where residents were worried that teenagers would congregate in parks and stand around and talk to each other, and how this anti-social behavior must be stopped.

A figure strode to the fissure, no more than man-high yet terror seemed to go before it. They could see the furnace-fire of its yellow eyes from afar; its arms were very long; it had a red [?tongue]. Through the air it sprang over the fiery fissure. The flames leaped up to great it and wreathed about it. Its streaming hair seemed to catch fire, and the sword that it held turned to flame. In its other hand it held a whip of many thongs.

• man-high probably means two rangar, so about 2m (something like the numenorean average male height). the half in halfling refers to being about one ranga tall.
• there is a terror aura.
• it’s not inherently on fire. the eyes look like they’re on fire. the flames (normal flames from a normal fire) dance about him. his hair SEEMS to catch fire (it doesnt).

this is the earliest conception of the balrog in LOTR, and the only thing it’s missing is the shadow aura.

there are earlier conceptions of balrogs but they’re much more vague and anyway, they refer to a very different conception of balrogs. or are we supposed to take the depiction of what seem to be flame tanks seriously too? (old version of the fall of gondolin)

i dont think arien had a body though. not even one she could put on or take off at will, like the other maiar.

balrogs were trapped in their physical bodies, like morgoth.

i think it just looked like a 2m tall dude with a shadow aura, and a lot of heat coming off him.

edit: yep, arien cast off her body and that’s when she was pure flame:

Too bright were the eyes of Arien for even the Eldar to look on, and leaving Valinor she forsook the form and raiment which like the Valar she had worn there, and she was as a naked flame, terrible in the fullness of her splendor.

she had to, cos the fruit ship she was gonna captain was too hot. it would’ve burned her god body.

Unfortunately, it seems we’re now in danger of repeating this very same mistake

mistake

???

they’ll call the next guy the “next trump”, but they’ll also say “even trump was better”.

and before you know it, they’ll have rehabilitated trump.

vidir is similar

there’s also rename (the perl one, not the shit one). i have fond memories of renaming albums with rename 's/(\d+)/sprintf "%02d", $1/e' so they’d ls in the correct order

i rely on this in my job. if i really need it, i’ll be using it often enough that it’ll always be in ^R distance :)

she sat down to a table with 10 zionists. now there are 11 zionists at that table.

eh, it’s calvinball. they could if the US said they could. but why would the US say that?

he thinks he’d be the albert speer but he’d actually be the goring.

mmmmmm <3

no, tmux is a newer screen. some of us havent switched cos we’re too lazy i guess? i think the common wisdom is that it’s better. i havent tried cos i already know enough of screen and it’s fine for me

• atools, which includes als, aunpack, apack. so you can stop caring about the kind of archive and just unpack it. it also saves you from shit archives that have multiple files/dirs in their root.
• perl -e / perl -lne / …
• units
• bc - a calculator that’s actually good
• pass - the only non-shit password store tool i’ve found so far. no gui, uses gpg and git to do the encrypting and storage/sharing
• alias lr='ls -lrth' - so you can easily find the newest file, cos that’s frequently what you want
• unip - my script to look up things in the unicode db
• find -type f -exec xzgrep 're' {} + - because xzgrep cant do -r

oh yeah, and for the shell readline, alt-b, alt-f, ctrl-w, ctrl-u, ctrl-k, ctrl-a, ctrl-e

doesnt actually do anything on gnu rm, and hasnt in like a decade. but yeah, dont do it.