Podcasts about Gondor

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Play Episode Listen Later Oct 16, 2025 81:39

We continue our Aragorn series this week. We cover his early life and meeting Arwen. Some deep details on who 'the wise' are, some of the areas in Gondor are fleshed out, and a good sprinkling of philology as always.

Episode 271: Creating Character Backstories

The Pulp Writer Show

Play Episode Listen Later Oct 6, 2025 21:23

In this week's episode, we take a look at creating good backstories for characters and how that can advance the plot. We also discuss two articles about the problems of generative AI. This coupon code will get you 25% off the ebook versions of books in the Sevenfold Sword series at my Payhip store: SEVENBOOKS The coupon code is valid through October 13, 2025. So if you need a new ebook this fall, we've got you covered! Here are links to the articles mentioned in the episode. Writer Beware: https://writerbeware.blog/2025/08/01/return-of-the-nigerian-prince-a-new-twist-on-book-marketing-scams/ Ed Zitron: https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-haters-gui/ TRANSCRIPT 00:00:00 Introduction and Writing Updates Hello, everyone. Welcome to Episode 271 of The Pulp Writer Show. My name is Jonathan Moeller. Today is October 3, 2025, and today we are looking at how to create character backstories. We'll also look at some good articles about the problems created by generative AI technology. If you hear occasional drumming noise in the background, it seems like the elementary school a few blocks from here is practicing their marching band. Hopefully it won't be too disruptive. First off, let's start with Coupon of the Week. This week's coupon code will get you 25% off the ebook versions of books in the Sevenfold Sword Series in my Payhip store, and that coupon code is SEVENBOOKS. And as always, the coupon code and the link to my Payhip store will be available in the show notes. This coupon code will be valid through October the 13th, 2025. If you need a new ebook for this fall, we have got you covered. Now let's have a progress update on my current writing projects. As of this recording, I am 83,000 words into Cloak of Worlds, which will be the 13th book in the Cloak Mage series. I'm thinking the book will end up about 110,000 words, so hopefully I will finish up the rough draft next week. We'll see how things go. I'm also 8,000 words into Blade of Shadows, which will be the sequel to Blade of Flames from last month, and that will be my main project once Cloak of Worlds is published (hopefully by the end of October, if all goes well). In audiobook news, I'm very pleased to report that recording and all the work is done on Ghost in the Siege (as excellently narrated by Hollis McCarthy) and we will actually close out this episode with a preview from that audiobook. It's currently up on my Payhip store and probably Google Play as of this recording, but it should be showing up on all the other stores before too much longer. 00:01:52 Generative AI Now onto our next topic, which is two very good articles about the problems of generative AI I read recently. The first (and I'll have the links to both articles in the show notes) is from Writer Beware, which talks about how generative AI is causing a new round of super targeted scammers. These scammers feed your book into the chatbot, which then generates a highly personalized email praising the book and offering marketing services. I got a ton of these scam emails after Stealth and Spells Online, Ghost in the Siege, and Blade of Flames came out in the past couple months and a bunch more after Malison: The Complete Series did well on BookBub at the end of August. So if you are a writer and you publish a book and a few days later or perhaps even the very same day, you get a very detailed email praising the book with very specific plot points and offering marketing services, beware, it's probably a scam that will give you no value whatsoever for your money. Journalist Edward Zitron wrote a great article explaining in extensive detail why generative AI is a bad idea that's probably going to cause a serious market crash in the next few years. I admit I started out with a mildly negative opinion of LLM based generative AI tools in 2022 and 2023, but I wanted my opinion to be an informed one. I've experimented with them on and off and read a good bit about them and as I've experimented with them, my opinion has moved from mildly negative to highly negative and finally arriving at completely anti-AI this year. I never used AI for any of my books, short stories, or cover images. I experimented a bit with using AI images for Facebook ads, but people generally hated them, so I stopped entirely with that. In fact, Facebook ads have become far less effective this year because of all the AI stuff Meta has crammed into them, but more on that later. So why did I arrive at a highly negative opinion of AI? It's because these tools do not actually do what their advocates promise, they're hideously expensive to run, and the enormous costs and downsides significantly outweigh any benefits. In addition to the problems mentioned in the Zitron article like cost, false promises, economic bubbles, and the companies blatantly lying about their capabilities, I think the fundamental difficulty with generative AI is that it's essentially a cognitive mirror for its users, like a Narcissus Machine like I've called it before. What do I mean by this? In Greek myth Narcissus was enraptured by the beauty of his own reflection. LLM based AI is essentially very fancy autocomplete, which means it guesses the most likely response to your prompt based on a statistical likelihood. In other words, it ends up mirroring your own thoughts back at you. So I think LLMs are highly prone to inducing an unconscious confirmation bias in the user. Confirmation bias is a logical fallacy where one interprets new information as confirming one's preexisting beliefs. It's healthier to reevaluate one's beliefs based on new information that comes in, but with confirmation bias, you warp any incoming information to fit a preexisting belief. For example, let's say you have the preexisting belief that you're immortal and nothing can kill you, and then you accidentally shoot yourself in the arm with a nail gun and you bleed. The correct interpretation of this is no, you are not in fact immortal and you can in fact die. Someone suffering under confirmation bias would say the fact that they accidentally shot themselves in the nail gun in the arm with a nail gun and didn't die is proof that they're immortal. That's obviously a logical fallacy, but you see why it's called a confirmation bias. I think even highly intelligent people using LLMS are prone to this kind of confirmation bias because the AI model settles on what is the most statistically likely response to the prompt, which means that consciously or not, you are guiding the LLM to give you the responses that please you. This is why you see on the tragically hilarious side, people who are convinced they've invented a new level of physics with the LLM or taught it to become self-aware or think that the LLM has fallen in love with them. And on the outright tragic side, people who have serious mental breakdowns or blow up their lives in destructive ways because of their interaction with the LLM. Grimly enough, I suppose the problem is going to sort itself out when the AI bubble crashes, whether in a few months or a few years. As one of the linked articles mentioned, AI companies have no clear path to profitability, save for chaining together infinite NVIDIA graphics cards and hoping they magically stumble into an artificial general intelligence or a super intelligence. They're not going to and it's all going to fall apart. The downside is that this is going to cause a lot of economic disruption when it crashes. I know I'm very negative about AI, but in the end I see hardly any good results or actual benefits from the technology. Lots of technology products are becoming worse from having AI stuffed into them (like Windows 11 and Microsoft Office) and what a few good results have come about will not last because the data centers are burning cash like there's no tomorrow. So again, you can see the links to these articles in the show notes and those are my thoughts on generative AI at the moment. 00:07:04 Writing Backstory for Characters [Note: Contains some mild spoilers for early books in the Frostborn, Half-Elven Thief, The Ghosts, and Cloak Games series] Now let's move on to a happier and frankly more interesting topic and that is writing backstory for characters. I will define it, talk about why backstory is important, give three tips about writing effective backstories, and share examples of good backstories from my own work and other media. First of all, what is a backstory? It's what happens to a character before the story begins or details of situation that happens before the story begins. Very often you'll have characters who have preexisting pasts before the story begins. It's very rare the story will begin when the main character is born and go from there. Even if that is the case, then some of the supporting characters obviously will have backstories. One example of a backstory could be a detective who had a twin sister who is kidnapped, which explains why he gets overly invested when a similar case happens. An example of a location's backstory would be knowing that a particular country was once part of another one and split off after revolution or war. That detail influences how people in that country currently treat people in the other nation. And you can see that a backstory is also an important component of world building as well, especially for fantasy and science fiction novels, though even novels set in in the contemporary world like mysteries and contemporary romance will often have backstories as well that require world building, because the location is very often fictional or will have fictional elements to it. Now, why is backstory important? For one thing, it makes a story feel more realistic and “lived in”, for lack of a better word. It's not realistic that absolutely nothing of interest happened to the protagonist before the story begins, or that nothing from their past would influence their current beliefs, behavior, and decisions. Backstory also gives characters clearer reasons for doing things. Returning to the earlier example of detective who had a younger sister who was kidnapped. What if the detective was a very procedural and by the book until a sudden similar case happened? Backstory can explain his unorthodox methods and willingness to solve the case at any cost. Backstory can also drive the plot in many ways. Continuing with the detective example, the detective's knowledge of his little sister's case leads him to find similar patterns in the new case and sends him on a search to prove that the cases are connected. As we can see from that, backstory is also a good way to set up plot hooks for later characters, such as we could have our detective here with his twin sister who disappeared in circumstances similar to his current case. It could be a fantasy hero who had previous battles with orcs and explains why he doesn't like seeing orcs. It could be a contemporary romance heroine who is reencountering her old flame, in which case the backstory would be central towards the plot, essentially. And now for three tips for writing backstory. First, it's important to not stop the plot to reveal backstory. Infodumping is generally something to be avoided when you are writing a novel. A little bit of it is unavoidable, but you want to avoid infodumping as much as possible and to reveal only as much information as necessary, partly because that creates a less cumbersome read for the reader and partly because that can also inspire a sense of mystery that sort of helps hook the reader and propels them forward into the story. It's also good to only reveal backstory that serves the plot or provides key information. For example, you could have in your detective's backstory that he went to high school and he was only a mediocre student and graduated with a GPA of 2.9 while doing well in athletics. Unless that's actually relevant to the story or has some significance to the plot, it's probably best to not include that. You can always tell when a writer has done a lot of research on a particular topic like firearms or travel or the history of a particular country because they are going to put that information in the book whether you want it or not. And if you're inventing an elaborate backstory for your character, it's best to avoid that impulse and only bring in details from the backstory as necessary. It's also important not to have the characters tell each other backstory that they would already know. For example, if you have two characters who've been married for 20 years, it would not be good to have them appear in dialogue as, “As you know, beloved wife, we have been married for 20 years this Tuesday.” It would be better if it's important to the plot to reveal that information like they're going out to a 20th anniversary party or their friends are throwing them a 20th anniversary party, that kind of thing, rather than having it come out in sort of a cumbersome conversation like that. Additionally, it's also important to only do as much backstory as necessary. For your main character, you may need a good deal of backstory or for the antagonist, but for supporting characters, it's less important to have a fully realized background. You need just enough so that they feel realistic and can contribute to the plot without overburdening the plot with too many details. Now, a few examples from my own books, mild spoilers here, nothing major but mild spoilers. I have written characters who have one key backstory element that influenced the plot. Ridmark Arban from Frostborn would be one and his major backstory point is that he was unable to save his wife Aelia from being killed five years before the story starts. Later on, there would be additional backstory that comes out for him in relation to his father and his brothers, but that is the main backstory point that defines his character for easily the first half of the series. Another example would be Morigna, whose parents were killed by the dvargir and then she was raised by a mysterious sorcerer who called himself the old man. And that is a major defining part of her character, that backstory that happened before we meet her in the narrative. I've also written characters with a lot of backstory, and the chief example of that would be Calliande from Frostborn as well, where she wakes up in the first book with no memory of her past and discovering what her backstory actually is a major driving force in the first eight books of the series. So that is a good example. Not to toot my own horn or anything, but that is a good example of using backstory as a mysterious narrative hook to pull the characters forward. Rivah from Half-Elven Thief is another character of mine who has a lot of backstory. In the backstory, she was raised in a noble household, her mother died, her father was about to sell her into slavery, so she fled into the streets and then she met Tobell and became part of his thieving crew. Tobell suffered a serious injury, and the thieving crew broke up and Rivah had to sort of strike out on her own while coming under debt to the procurator Marandis. So there is a lot of backstory there and all of it is important to Rivah's character and I think I've done my best to sort of feed that into the story as necessary to drive the plot rather than hopefully unloading it all in a massive infodump. And I have written characters with very little backstory, and the prime example of those would be Caina and Nadia. In Caina's series, the series starts when she's 11 years old and living with her parents and we develop Caina as she goes along and follow her she grows to adulthood and then increasing prominence in her world. With Nadia, the very first scene in the book is her first day of kindergarten pledging allegiance to the flag, the United States, and the High Queen of the Elves, which is the first indicator that Nadia's world, while very similar as to ours, is nonetheless very different. Like Caina, the book's narrative starts when Nadia is very young and then we see her develop along the course of the books. In a good example of backstory used well from another book would be Aragorn from J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings, where Aragorn's backstory is extremely important because when the hobbits first meet him at The Prancing Pony in Bree, he's just this mysterious wanderer known as Strider. But later on, we learn that he's actually the last heir of Gondor and Arnor and the rightful king of Gondor. His desire to reclaim his heritage and fulfill the role destiny has prepared for him is a major part of his character and that actually grows organically out of his backstory. I'm not usually fond of prequels, but a good example of a prequel using backstory effectively would be the combination of the Andor TV show and the Rogue One movie, where they create this excellent backstory for the Star Wars movie [Episode IV]. They do it through good characterization so you can see all the motivations of the characters as they go about their various missions and errands. So hopefully that gives you a good look into the process of creating backstory and how best to use it for writing your own stories. So that is it for this week. Thank you for listening to The Pulp Writer Show. I hope you found this show useful. A reminder that you can listen to all the back episodes of the show at https://thepulpwritershow.com. If you enjoyed the podcast, please leave a review on your podcasting platform of choice. Stay safe and stay healthy and see you all next week. And now let's close out with a preview of the audiobook of Ghosts in the Siege, as excellently narrated by Hollis McCarthy [audiobook excerpt follows].

75 - Guests - Fool of a Took Podcast - Tolkien Nerd Version of the Avengers

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Play Episode Listen Later Sep 21, 2025 144:47

Buy Chris' book here (available in paperback, Audible or ebook): https://shorturl.at/N6AbXFool of a Took Socials: https://shorturl.at/92y3AThis week we're joined by the lovely lads Chris and Pat from the Fool of a Took Podcast. 4 Americans who have a similar goal to us. They bring you to Tolkien in a relaxed, accessible way!Join us for a good long chat about where they are in reading the books, gatekeeping in the Tolkien community (it's bad, don't do it), the history of the Stewards in Gondor, how middle-earth is a mad-max apocalypse, and so much more.Get them wherever you listen, but mainly on YouTube, as they're primarily a video podcast!

193 One (Smoke) Ring to Rule Them All: Gondor's Tobacconist

Get Piped

Play Episode Listen Later Sep 18, 2025 87:48

Send us a textWell met friends! In this episode of the Get Piped Podcast, Adam and Nick discuss Middle Earth's preeminent tobacconist from GondorIn the segments, Adam finds ranks LOTR Hell Yeah Brothers and then Adam and Nick choose some LOTR themed This or That's.Support the showPURCHASE BATTLE OF THE BRIAR FOREVER: Blu-Ray: https://getpiped.co/products/battle-of-the-briar or Digital Copy: https://www.patreon.com/GetPiped/shop/battle-of-briar-pipe-smoking-documentary-690160__________ Don't forget to subscribe/follow the GPP so you never miss an episode.We want to hear from you! If you have any further questions, comments, or recommendations, send them to show@getpiped.co.__________Follow Get Piped on Instagram. Follow Producer Guy on Instagram.Check out the Get Piped YouTube for more content.Join the Get Piped community Discord here.Support the GPP by joining the Patreon.Check out the Get Piped merch store.GPP is created by Adam Floyd (Get Piped)GPP is produced by Nick Masella (Producer Guy).Music for this episode is from StreamBeats.

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Forth Eorlingas! (w/ Bret Devereaux)

The Entmoot Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 28, 2025 118:39

In which co-hosts Kenny and Sam talk to Professor Bret Devereaux about the Siege of Gondor and the Battle of Helm's Deep, including discussions of pre-modern logistics, cavalry charges, flails, command structures, battle speeches, and much more.Bret Devereaux is an ancient and military historian who currently teaches as a Teaching Assistant Professor at North Carolina State University. You can find him on Twitter and Bluesky, or at his blog A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry.More Bret:Blog series on Siege of GondorBlog series on Helm's DeepBlog series on logisticsInterview with Patrick Wyman on the Punic WarsLeave us a review! Send us an email at entmootpod@gmail.com! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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Week 091 - Middle-earth Map Monday: Less-important Fires

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Play Episode Listen Later Aug 25, 2025 10:24

Join The Man of the West for an in-depth look at each of the Beacon-hills of Gondor in this Middle-earth Map Monday, as we continue exploring Anórien. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

73 - Corsairs of Umbar - It's a Pirate's Life for Me

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Play Episode Listen Later Aug 20, 2025 65:25

Buy Chris' book here (available in paperback, Audible or ebook): https://shorturl.at/N6AbXThis week we cover the history of Umbar, the troubling region south of Gondor that gave birth to the most famous pirates in Middle-earth.

Week 090 - Middle-earth Map Monday: Paid Little Attention

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 18, 2025 7:47

While today's title could describe The Man of the West's years in college, it's actually the narrative calling out a hobbit. Start this week with a Middle-earth Map Monday about the Beacons of Gondor! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Week 089 - Middle-earth Map Monday: From Erui to Mindolluin

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Play Episode Listen Later Aug 11, 2025 9:10

Join The Man of the West as he begins Series 12 of the TTT with a Middle-earth Map Monday on the region of Gondor known as Anórien. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Episode 85: Lesser-Trod Histories 11: The War of the Ring

Athrabeth

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 6, 2025 53:38

In this next installment of The History of Middle-earth, Jude and Stef chat about volume 8: The War of the Ring. Stef talks about Part 2, Chapter 5, “Faramir”, and Jude focuses Part 3, Chapter 9, “The Battle of the Pelennor Fields”. We discuss Tolkien's writing process, the character development of Faramir, Eowyn, and the Witch King, and the progression of thematic elements of Rohan and Gondor. Citations:Brown, Sara. (2025, Aug 2). ““Her hair was held a marvel unmatched”: The Significance of Long, Blonde Hair in Tolkien's Imagination” [Paper presentation], Mythopoeic Society OMS 4 - Online MidSummer Seminar 2025 “More Perilous and Fair: Women and Gender in Mythopoeic Fantasy”, online. https://www.mythsoc.org/oms/oms-04.htmTolkien, J. R. R. The War of the Ring: The History of The Lord of the Rings, Part Three. Ed. Christopher Tolkien. The History of Middle-earth: Vol. 8. Unwin Hyman, London, 1990.

Lord of the Rings (2001-03), Part 1 (ft. Will) - Who the hell is Gondor?

The Goods: A Film Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 4, 2025 91:36

One podcast episode to rule them all. Dan's brother Will joins Brian to hunker down and dig deep into Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings trilogy. In this part 1, they give some background context on the info, then dive into Fellowship of the Ring and The Two Towers. Dan, outed as a Tolkien skeptic in the podcast's previous episode of adaptations of the author's work (look up Animated Tolkien in our episode history), does his best to parse through the story and make sense of Tolkien's dense worldbuilding and bizarre naming conventions. Will offers the perspective an invested fan. Brian finds some middle ground. Join soon Part 2, which includes a discussion of The Return of the King and a review of some of the overarching elements of the trilogy. Dan's movie reviews: http://thegoodsreviews.com/ Subscribe, join the Discord, and find us on Letterboxd: http://thegoodsfilmpodcast.com/

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Episode 259: Comparison Is The Thief Of Joy

The Pulp Writer Show

Play Episode Listen Later Jul 14, 2025 16:28

In this week's episode, we look at five ways writers can avoid the self-destructive mindset trap of "comparisonitis", and five ways that comparing oneself to other writers can be useful. Once again it is time for Coupon of the Week! This coupon code will get you 50% off the audiobook of Cloak of Wolves, Book #2 in the Cloak Mage series, (as excellently narrated by Hollis McCarthy) at my Payhip store: WOLVES50 The coupon code is valid through August 5th, 2025. So if you need a new audiobook this summer, we've got you covered! TRANSCRIPT 00:00:00 Introduction and Writing Updates Hello, everyone. Welcome to Episode 259 of The Pulp Writer Show. My name is Jonathan Moeller. Today is July 11th, 2025, and today we are looking at why comparing yourself to other writers is a bad idea. Before that, we will do Coupon of the Week and have an update on my current writing progress. This week's coupon code will get you 50% off the audiobook of Cloak of Wolves, Book #2 in the Cloak Mage series (as excellently narrated by Hollis McCarthy) at my Payhip store, and that is WOLVES50. This coupon code is valid through August 5th, 2025. So if you need a new audiobook to listen to during your travels this summer, we have got you covered. Now let's have an update on my current writing projects. I'm pleased to report that Shield of Power is 100% done, completing the Shield War series. You can get Shield of Power at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Google Play, Apple Books, Smashwords and my own Payhip store. It's been selling briskly and it's gotten good reviews so far, so thank you very much to everyone who has bought and enjoyed the book. Now that Shield of Power is done, the first third of my Super Summer of Finishing Things is complete. So what's next? My next main project is Stealth and Spells Online: Final Quest. It was originally going to be named Reactant, but I changed the title to Final Quest to emphasize really and truly and definitively that this is the final book in the trilogy. In fact, I'm already done with the rough draft and I am done with the first phase of editing it as of this recording. If you've been listening to the podcast for a long time, you know how I frequently say that if you keep chipping away the novel over a long enough time, sooner or later you'll finish it. That is exactly what happened here. Since October of 2024, I've been writing 500 words a day on Final Quest, and this piled up over time enough so that after Shield of Power came out, I only had 3,000 more words to write to finish Final Quest, and I did that in an afternoon. One more phase of editing on that and then I would like to have Stealth and Spells Online: Final Quest out before July 22nd, if all goes well. I'm also 21,000 words into Ghost in the Siege, which will be my main project once Final Quest is finished. Ghost in the Siege will be the sixth and final book in the Ghost Armor series and will hopefully cap off my Super Summer of Finishing Things. In audiobook news, Shield of Battle (as excellently narrated by Brad Wills) is now out. You can get it at Audible, Amazon, Apple, and Google Play as of this recording. Because of some difficulties with Findaway Voices, it's going to take a little bit longer to get into the other stores, but I'm working on a way to do that and as I mentioned before, Ghost in the Corruption (as excellently narrated by Hollis McCarthy ) is done and just has to finish processing on the various stores, and so hopefully that should be out before too much longer. So that's where I'm at with my current writing and audiobook projects. 00:02:52 Main Topic: Comparison Now let's move right on to our main topic, The Dangers of Comparison. In Episode 257, we started a series on mindset for writers. In some of the previous series I've talked about some of the practical ways to help with distractions, procrastination, and managing time wasters. In this series, we're going to focus on things that derail writers from a mindset perspective because as we know with any endeavor in life, mindset is something like three quarters of the battle where if you convince yourself that you're going to fail before you start, you're probably going to fail. So that's why it's important to have an appropriate mindset to the task at hand. Today we're going to focus on comparing yourself to others, and I will share five reasons it's not a great idea to compare yourself to others aimlessly and how to shift your focus to five more constructive ways to compare your work to other authors. Comparisons are a constant of the reading world. Librarians and Goodreads reviewers talk constantly about “readalikes” or finding books that have similar themes or settings. Book displays and shops and libraries love to group similar books or authors together. People look at the bestseller lists like they're sports scores. Dollar amounts in publishing deals are a constant source of gossip and jealousy. Sometimes comparison is useful, especially when creating ads or finding the right demographics to market to. Other times, it can lead to limiting or self-destructive thoughts. So let's start off with five reasons not to compare yourself to others. #1: It can limit you creatively. It can be easy to look at the bestseller list and try to think of ways to write a similar book. Following publishing trends keeps you from your most creative work and frankly isn't as enjoyable to write and most likely for your readers to read. Also, unless you're a fast writer, the publishing world might have moved on by the time you finished that book. In fact, I just saw a thread on social media about that where the commenter was bemoaning the fact that she used to enjoy what's now called cozy fantasy, but that as the genre has evolved, it's developed established tropes and the writers of it are not willing to variate from those tropes. So you have what she said in her words were dozens of clones of Lattes and Legends and Bookshops and Bone Dusts floating around, which is a tricky thread to balance, I do admit, because you want something that'll appeal to the reader, but then the readers like familiarity. What they really seem to like is familiarity presented to them in a way they've never seen before, which can be a challenge when you are trying to look at the bestseller list and limit yourself creatively. #2: What other people are doing is out of your control. You can't control if a book you think isn't as good as yours is suddenly the runaway hit of the year or an author who isn't experienced as you suddenly gets a movie deal. You can't control their success, so don't worry about it or get upset by it. You can control if you're wasting time online mocking those people or complaining about it, for example. That's a waste of your time and energy and doesn't actually make you feel better in the long run (and possibly in the short run as well). I believe in psychology and in military theory for that matter, there's something called the locus of control where you identify the things that you can control and then you drill in and focus in on the things you can control rather than worrying about the things you can't control. As we said, if an author who wrote a book you don't think is very good or you don't personally like has had a massive amount of success, there's nothing you can do about that and worrying about it is a waste of time and comparing yourself to that writer is also a waste of time. So that's why it's a better idea to focus in on what you can control. #3: You're not being fair to yourself. Comparing yourself to other authors, especially as an aspiring or new author, isn't being fair to yourself. They have years (if not decades) of experience that you don't have. It's like comparing yourself to an ultra-marathoner when you're someone who's just starting to jog and struggling to get all the way around the block, which is some of the tricky parts of someone like me giving advice to new writers because Shield of Power was my 163rd book and Stealth and Spells Online: Final Quest will be my 164th. I've been doing this for a long time, which means I probably know what I'm talking about, but that not everything I do is immediately reproducible by someone who hasn't been doing it as long as I have. If you're writing something that's not as marketable or in a smaller genre, it's not fair to compare yourself to people in the biggest genre or even your own previous work. For example, I can't compare the amount one of my technical books earns to one of my fantasy books. If I did that, it'd be a disappointment. But in reality, my technical books have had steady success and have even been used as textbooks at times (which is always surprising when I discovered that's happened because my Windows Command Line book and my Linux Command Line book have both been used as textbooks at various times, which was a surprise to me because that's not what I expected when I set out to write them, but I'm glad that they've been able to be useful for people). #4: And point number four, which I think is a really important one, someone's online life is only the highlight reel of someone's actual life. Looking at someone's social media accounts isn't a great way to know what they're actually doing or how they're actually doing. Just because they're posting pictures of tropical vacations, speaking at conferences, or showing off shiny new stuff doesn't mean you're seeing the full picture of how they're actually doing. As I said in a recent episode that when I was applying for disability insurance (just in case I need it someday), I learned that writers are actually one of the hardest professions to insure due to their high rates of mental illness and substance abuse. You might see the good stuff, but they might not be posting the challenges that come with their success: increased stress and anxiety, more criticism, the need to hire people and how much time it takes to manage them, more complicated taxes, increased business expenses, and relationship problems from the demands of success. These are all things that can accompany success. You're not getting the whole picture. You need to keep that in mind when you compare yourself to people online. The best fictional example out of this that applies to so many situations is Lord Denethor and the Palantir from Return of the King. If you read the book, Denethor has been using the Palantir for years to spy on Sauron and give advantages to his forces and the soldiers of Gondor. But Sauron is able to manipulate what Denethor sees in the Palantir and has been gradually using this to create an edited version of what Denethor sees in the Palantir, and that drives Denethor to despair and eventual suicide. People talk about the increased rates of mental illness related to social media. Sauron did that deliberately to Denethor through the Palantir. It's a sign of how good J.R.R. Tolkien was a writer that he managed to anticipate the effects that Facebook would have on some people by like 60 years. So always bear that in mind when you're looking at someone online and feeling jealous of them. You are not getting the whole picture and there are more than likely things going on that are difficulties in their life that they just don't talk about. #5: Your time is better spent writing than comparing yourself to other writers. And this is back to our old friend, the locus of control. Looking at other authors' sales ranks and reviews is not a productive use of your time. As I mentioned in the writing adjacent activities series, you need to be purposeful in non-writing tasks that take up your time and make sure you're not pretending they're writing related. If you need to compare sales ranks or some other data point with other authors or something you're actively working on like ad targeting, schedule that time and don't let it turn into an Internet spiral of time wasting. And now to avoid those Internet spirals of time wasting, here are five ways to use comparisons positively and constructively. #1: Number one, getting keywords or demographics for marketing purposes. For sites like BookBub or when creating keyword ads, knowing authors who are similar to you is incredibly helpful and can help you structure your ads. And this doesn't even necessarily require you to read the other author's books to see if they actually compare. There are tools that let you expedite this process. For example, if you look on Amazon at the Also Boughts, you can scroll through some of that and see which other authors and which other books people have bought in addition to your own and then you can test using those for keyword targeting. On Goodreads, people put books in lists or compare books. You can use that data to generate keywords for ad targeting. You can test them very easily. With BookBub ads in particular, if you build a campaign around just a single author and keywords and test the results. You can quickly see whether a specific author generates an appropriate click-through rate for you to use or not. #2: A second way is to find authors you might want to do a promo with. Some authors, especially in the romance genre, do really well with group promotions. Finding other authors that write similar books and are at a similar level of success may be a way to take advantage of that. I've never actually set up a group promo, but I have participated in several of them from time to time with pretty good results. #3: A third way is to better understand reader preferences in a genre. My best story for this is I've gone through six different variations of cover design for the Silent Order series. When I started out, I was using GIMP and stock photo images. GIMP is the free Linux version of Photoshop essentially. After I learned Photoshop, I upgraded to characters on the covers, but they never quite sold quite as well until finally I saw a Penny Arcade comic where they were commenting how they just want to buy books where they have spaceships in close proximity to planets on the covers. And I thought, huh, that makes a lot of sense. So I redesigned all the covers to have a spaceship in close proximity to a planet, and the series immediately started selling a fair bit better with those covers. I would say that was not so much a comparison thing, just a genre preference I stumbled across and then had sort of the moment of enlightenment that I did. But if I had looked at the bestseller list for various science fiction categories, I would have realized that most of the bestsellers had spaceships and planets in close proximity to each other on the cover. So I redesigned all the covers. It was just that I was too fond of the character based covers to give them up until I had that moment of revelation. So all the main books in the series were redesigned to have the spaceship covers, though for the free short stories, I did keep the character covers just because I was giving away the free short stories and I did like the character covers, so I got to have my cake and eat it too, which was nice. #4: Learn from the successes and failures of others. You can learn from what another author does well. For example, Brandon Sanderson is very good at communicating his writing progress and other updates to his fans through weekly video messages on YouTube. Other authors are good at collaborating with other authors, while others make engaging and funny videos that make people more interested in their work. Knowing your own strengths is an important first step. If you're just trying to follow everyone who is a success without first reflecting on that, you'll chase too many options and then can't excel at any of them. You can also learn from when an author responds poorly and how the Internet reacts to it. Understandably, I'm not going to give specific examples here. For myself, I tend to focus on what I do best, which is writing really fast and doing social media updates. I never got into video because I kind of have a face for radio and I just don't enjoy doing video. I don't enjoy editing them. It's a lot of work that I don't really enjoy, so I don't do it. #5: Being informed makes comparisons less emotional. Knowing, for example, that an author was hired to write a book based on an existing outline created by the publisher, and then promised a future book deal with a big marketing budget in a preferred genre as part of the contract makes their cross-genre success seem less surprising and makes you feel less guilty for not being able to do the same on your own as an indie author. It's not a fair comparison because they have advantages that you can't understand without some industry knowledge. For people that compare themselves to me, for example, they should know that I've been writing since I was a teenager a very long time ago. I was an early adopter of self-publishing when it was less competitive and I usually work more than eight hours a day and I generally keep to a very rigid writing schedule. Some authors like me were able to get the rights back to their earlier published works and then self-publish them early on in order to finish a series, which is much less likely to be an option in a contract for a traditionally published author now. If you're just starting out, travel frequently for work, and only have an hour a day to write (and even that is dicey because your partner would rather you spend that time on some other activity because they don't support your writing), you can't possibly compare your writing output to mine. Knowing all this about me explains why it might be harder for you and why you shouldn't feel bad about having a harder time with writing. Comparison has been called “The Thief of Joy” all over social media for many years. That can definitely be true, but like so many things in life, how you respond to something and find ways to help it make you stronger is what really matters. Comparison has its place in the writing world, but it's important to keep it in perspective and not to let it overwhelm you emotionally or keep you from your writing goals or plans. So that is it for talking about comparison. I hope that was helpful and offered some useful tips on how to avoid the trap of comparison-itis. So that's it for this week. Thanks for listening to The Pulp Writer Show. I hope you found the show useful. A reminder that you can listen to all the back episodes at https://thepulpwritershow.com. If you enjoyed the podcast, please leave a review on your podcasting platform of choice. Stay safe and stay healthy and see you all next week.

ASALTO A GONDOR: la guerra en la Tierra Media. Fantasia e Historia Militar Carlos Márquez - Acceso anticipado

BELLUMARTIS PODCAST

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 19, 2025 84:47

Agradece a este podcast tantas horas de entretenimiento y disfruta de episodios exclusivos como éste. ¡Apóyale en iVoox! Acceso anticipado para Fans - ¿como era la guerra en el mundo de #tolkien ? Descubrelo en este programa sobre la Guerra de Gondor con Carlos Márquez Linares LIBROS DE J.R.R. TOLKIEN https://amzn.to/3YW2Qte Podeís ver: - GUERRAS DE GONDOR. Historia Militar y subcreación en la Tierra Media de Tolkien https://youtube.com/live/RPROZD4SafY - EL SEÑOR DE LOS ANILLOS y LA HISTORIA: El mundo de Tolkin no es tan imaginario https://youtu.be/NkBDd0vtEd4 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- COMPRA EN AMAZON CON EL ENLACE DE BHM Y AYUDANOS ************** https://amzn.to/3ZXUGQl ************* ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- LOS LIBROS DE PACO https://franciscogarciacampa.com/libros/ ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Si queréis apoyar a Bellumartis Historia Militar e invitarnos a un café o u una cerveza virtual por nuestro trabajo, podéis visitar nuestro PATREON https://www.patreon.com/bellumartis o en PAYPAL https://www.paypal.me/bellumartis o en BIZUM 656/778/825 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Conviértete en miembro de este canal y apoya nuestro trabajo https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCTtIr7Q_mz1QkzbZc0RWUrw/join -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- No olvidéis suscribiros al canal, si aún no lo habéis hecho. Si queréis ayudarnos, dadle a “me gusta” y también dejadnos comentarios. De esta forma ayudaréis a que los programas sean conocidos por más gente. Y compartidnos con vuestros amigos y conocidos. SIGUENOS EN TODAS LAS REDES SOCIALES ¿Queréis contactar con nosotros? Puedes escribirnos a bellumartispublicidad@hotmail.com como por WHATSAP o en BIZUM 656778825 Nuestra página principal es https://bellumartishistoriamilitar.blogspot.com y en la pagína web de Francisco García Campa https://franciscogarciacampa.com Escucha este episodio completo y accede a todo el contenido exclusivo de BELLUMARTIS PODCAST. Descubre antes que nadie los nuevos episodios, y participa en la comunidad exclusiva de oyentes en https://go.ivoox.com/sq/618669

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Talking About Tolkien - The Departure of Boromir (Towers 3-1)

Words About Books

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 11, 2025 38:58

We bid a fond farewell to The Horn of Gondor. And also Boromir."JRR Tolkien is the best perspective shift writer I've ever read." https://youtu.be/2sh9VvmzpMwSupport the showBlue Sky - https://bsky.app/profile/wordsaboutbooks.bsky.socialDiscord - https://discord.gg/6BaNRtcP8CThreads - https://www.threads.net/@wordsaboutbookspodcastInstagram - https://www.instagram.com/wordsaboutbookspodcastBlog - https://blog.wordsaboutbooks.ninja/

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Ep. 95- Lord of the Rings Deep Dive: Book 5 Chapter 10 & Book 6 Chapter 1

Exploring Middle-Earth

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 9, 2025 69:43

Join Jay and Grant this episode as we continue our deep dive on the Return of the King and switch perspectives between the captains of Gondor and the wayward hobbits Frodo and Sam. The Nats' clubhouse book club is on a journey to Middle-earth this seasonBurgschneider blows past Kickstarter goals for Middle-earth Brandywine FestivalFinding Your Way Into Writing Fiction as J.R.R. Tolkien's GrandsonCheck us out on Goodreads:GrantJayContact us at exploringmiddleearthpod@gmail.comFollow us on Instagram! @exploringmiddle_earthFollow us on X! @ExpMiddleEarth https://twitter.com/ExpMiddleEarthConnect with us on myspace: https://myspace.com/exploringmiddle-earthMusic: Adventure (remaster) by Alexander Nakarada (https://www.creatorchords.com)Licensed under Creative Commons BY Attribution 4.0 Licensehttps://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

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Week 082 - Middle-earth Map Monday: The Far-off Days of the Glory of Gondor

west series middle earth far off gondor

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 2, 2025 10:11

Join The Man of the West as he begins Series 11 of Today's Tolkien Times with a return to Middle-earth Map Monday as our Rohan road trip stops at Súthburg. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Becoming Boromir \\ Lord of the Rings Character Analysis [Free Preview]

Becoming The Main Character

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 2, 2025 11:21

This is a free preview of the deep dive into Boromir, Captain of Gondor. For the full episode subscribe to BTMC: Protagonist Edition:⁠⁠⁠⁠https://becomingmain.supercast.com/Is Boromir the most misunderstood character in Lord of the Rings? I'm about to make a very strong case that he is.He never asked to be forgiven, he only asked for a chance to prove he was better than his weakest moment.What lessons can we learn from Boromir about rising above our failures and how to be a noble leader? Tune in to find out.---------------------BTMC: Protagonist Edition, where you can get EXTENDED VERSIONS of the episodes to take you even deeper into the story with more scenes, more lessons, and more of everything that makes the show what it is, as well as access to all of the Character Analysis episodes. Sign up link below: Get BTMC: PROTAGONIST EDITION: ⁠⁠https://becomingmain.supercast.com/⁠⁠FOLLOW BTMC FOR MORE GREAT CONTENT:Instagram: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://instagram.com/becomingmain⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠X: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://twitter.com/becomingmain⁠⁠⁠

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Fan Films

SQPN: Secrets of Middle-earth

Play Episode Listen Later May 20, 2025 49:39

From backyard battles to cinematic gems, Jeff Haecker and Thomas Salerno dissect three Tolkien fan films—highlighting heartfelt efforts, haunting blades, and heroic calls for aid. Featuring Halifirien, Legend of Gurthang, and the excellent Horn of Gondor. The post Fan Films appeared first on StarQuest Media.

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The Rewatch Party 220 - Batman Forever (1995)

Emergency Exit Podcast Network

Play Episode Listen Later Apr 27, 2025 106:11

a passionate defense of Ben Affleck's chin, and more nipple-based humor than should legally be allowed on a podcast. We also pitch Nicole Kidman as Harley Quinn, speculate on Batman's secret stash of Pearl necklaces, and marvel at the sheer audacity of that universal remote Batcave shutdown. This one is a glorious mess — the movie and the episode. So is Batman Forever actually worth revisiting? Depends who you ask. There is charm in its chaos, but it's hard not not feel punished by a glow-in-the-dark god. But either way, it made for one hell of a good time. Join us as we light the fires, summon the Nipples of Gondor, and ask the real questions — like what exactly is your Batmobile made of? https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0112462/

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The Two Towers: Ch 1-3

Harry Potter and the First Time Readers

Play Episode Listen Later Apr 21, 2025 95:43

Chapter 1 - The Departure of BoromirHe turned from the North back again to North, and saw nothing save the distant hills, unless it were that far away he could see again a great bird like an eagle high in the air, descending slowly in wide circles down towards the earth.Q1 - What, if any, symbolism is there with the Eagles?Q2 - Why does Aragorn always shout Elendil?‘Farewell, Aragorn! Go to Minas Tirith and save my people! I have failed.' ‘No!' said Aragorn, taking his hand and kissing his brow. ‘You have conquered. Few have gained such a victory. Be at peace! Minas Tirith shall not fall!' Boromir smiled. ‘Which way did they go? Was Frodo there?' said Aragorn. But Boromir did not speak again.Q3 - What do you think about Boromir's passing?Q4 - Is Aragorn making the right decision?Chapter 2 - The Riders of Rohan‘I think that the enemy brought his own enemy with him,' answered Aragorn. ‘These are Northern Orcs from far away. Among the slain are none of the great Orcs with the strange badges. There was a quarrel, I guess: it is no uncommon thing with these foul folk. Maybe there was some dispute about the road.'Q1 - What do you think their quarrel was about?Q2 - These chapters keep mentioning this West Wind for Gondor…what is that about?Q3 - How tense was this chapter with the chase…Q4 - What is the deal with Saruman poisoning the land or their journey?Gimli rose and planted his feet firmly apart: his hand gripped the handle of his axe, and his dark eyes flashed. ‘Give me your name, horse-master, and I will give you mine, and more besides,' he said. ‘As for that,' said the Rider, staring down at the Dwarf, ‘the stranger should declare himself first. Yet I am named E´omer son of E´omund, and am called the Third Marshal of Riddermark.' ‘Then E´omer son of E´omund, Third Marshal of Riddermark, let Gimli the Dwarf Glo´in's son warn you against foolish words. You speak evil of that which is fair beyond the reach of your thought, and only little wit can excuse you.' E´omer's eyes blazed, and the Men of Rohan murmured angrily, and closed in, advancing their spears. ‘I would cut off your head, beard and all, Master Dwarf, if it stood but a little higher from the ground,' said E´omer. ‘He stands not alone,' said Legolas, bending his bow and fitting an arrow with hands that moved quicker than sight. ‘You would die before your stroke fell.'Q5 - Don't insult Galadriel around Gimli.‘Halflings!' laughed the Rider that stood beside E´omer. ‘Halflings! But they are only a little people in old songs and children's tales out of the North. Do we walk in legends or on the green earth in the daylight?'Q6 - What do you think of Eomer and his disbelief that Hobbits are real? Some years ago the Lord of the Black Land wished to purchase horses of us at great price, but we refused him, for he puts beasts to evil use. Then he sent plundering Orcs, and they carry off what they can, choosing always the black horses: few of these are now left. For that reason our feud with the Orcs is bitter.Q7 - So the men of Rohan, have NOT been selling horses to Sauron?Chapter 3 - The Uruk-HaiHe cut the thongs round Pippin's legs and ankles, picked him up by his hair and stood him on his feet. Pippin fell down, and Uglu´k dragged him up by his hair again. Several Orcs laughed. Uglu´k thrust a flask between his teeth and poured some burning liquid down his throat: he felt a hot fierce glow flow through him. The pain in his legs and ankles vanished. He could stand.Q1 - What is this stuff?When he had forced a drink from his flask down the hobbit's throat, cut his leg-bonds, and dragged him to his feet, Merry stood up, looking pale but grim and defiant, and very much alive. The gash in his forehead gave him no more trouble, but he bore a brown scar to the end of his days. ‘Hullo, Pippin!' he said. ‘So you've come on this little expedition, too? Where do we get bed and breakfast?'Q2 - Is Merry going crazy or is he just making Pippen laugh?Q3 - There's an arrow that hits Grishnuk that is guided by fate, the book suggests…what role does fate play in the story so far?

Week 076 - Silmarillion Saturday: Stirred as by a Cold Wind

alexander nakarada waning gondor

Play Episode Listen Later Apr 5, 2025 9:00

Join The Man of the West for the continuing story Of the Rings of Power and the Third Age, as we witness the fall of Arnor and the waning of Gondor. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Ep. 90 - The Waning of Gondor

Exploring Middle-Earth

Play Episode Listen Later Mar 31, 2025 54:45

Check us out on Goodreads:Grant: www.goodreads.com/user/show/175355524-grant-mulderJay: www.goodreads.com/user/show/61189862-jay-benedictContact us at exploringmiddleearthpod@gmail.comFollow us on Instagram! @exploringmiddle_earthFollow us on X! @ExpMiddleEarth https://twitter.com/ExpMiddleEarthConnect with us on myspace: https://myspace.com/exploringmiddle-earthMusic: Adventure (remaster) by Alexander Nakarada (https://www.creatorchords.com)Licensed under Creative Commons BY Attribution 4.0 Licensehttps://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King with Dr. Stanley Miller | Howard Shore

Settling the Score

Play Episode Listen Later Mar 27, 2025 43:37

Gondor calls for aid...and the Settlers shall answer. We're making our long-awaited return to Middle Earth to once and for all vanquish the One Ring. Carried to the summit of Mount Doom by Tolkien enthusiast Dr. Stanley Miller, we dissect what made Howard Shore's epic conclusion to the LotR trilogy a true masterpiece.Ev's score: 10 / Al's score: 9.9 / Ky's score: 9.9 / Stan's score: 9.9Musical term: DissonanceInstrumental Instrument: ShakuhachiIf you like what you hear, follow us on Spotify and opt-in to get notified when we drop future episodes. Better yet, get in touch and keep up with our score-settling antics on TikTok or Instagram.00:00 Introduction to the Journey00:58 Welcoming Dr. Stanley Miller01:04 Partying in Hobbiton and Baltimore02:23 A Trip to Hobbiton04:10 Stan's Passion for Tolkien04:26 The Power of Storytelling06:49 Howard Shore's Musical Genius11:05 The Shire Theme Evolution13:04 Emotional Impact of the Music26:01 Lighting of the Beacons30:57 Final Reflections and Scores36:05 Conclusion and Fun Facts

Extravaganza!! Best Attachments

Card Talk

Play Episode Listen Later Mar 3, 2025 36:34

Can you believe that Steward of Gondor almost didn't make the list? Become a patron! https://www.patreon.com/cardtalk2018 Visit our blog! https://www.cardtalk2018.com

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Week 073 - Silmarillion Saturday: The Yearning of Exile

west exile kingdoms yearning silmarillion gondor arnor

Play Episode Listen Later Feb 22, 2025 10:44

Join The Man of the West as we read a summary of the early years of the Kingdoms of Arnor and Gondor, and their ‘many treasures and great heirlooms of virtue and wonder'. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Who Is Isildur Really?

The Council of Elrond

Play Episode Listen Later Feb 19, 2025 63:37

Today we are discussing Isildur and his time in Númenor, the founding and ruling of Gondor, the War of the Last Alliance, his possession of The One Ring, and ultimately, his downfall. Listen to this podcast on Spotify here!! https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/themellonheads We are on PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/themellonheadsYou can find us at: ⁠⁠ https://linktr.ee/themellonheads⁠⁠ If you enjoy our content and would like to support us, you can do so at this link: https://www.buymeacoffee.com/themellonheads #isildur #lotr #lordoftherings

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64 - The Last Alliance - Sauron Part 8

American Conservative University

Play Episode Listen Later Feb 16, 2025 52:44

In this episode, we dive into Sauron's return to Mordor after his disastrous beach trip to Númenor, his transformation from deceiver to full-blown terror lord, and the rise of Elendil and his sons in Middle-earth. We break down how Aragorn is connected to Númenor's good side, the founding of Gondor and Arnor, and the Last Alliance's war against Sauron. Also, we mourn the Entwives, question Elven leadership skills, and admire some good old fisticuffs.

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Trump Needs to Act Like Lincoln and Defy Judicial Authority. John Zmirak and Eric Metaxas.

Play Episode Listen Later Feb 14, 2025 39:15

Trump Needs to Act Like Lincoln and Defy Judicial Authority. John Zmirak and Eric Metaxas. The Eric Metaxas Show John Zmirak Feb 12 2025 Other Episodes Trump needs to Act Like Lincoln and Defy Judicial Authority When Necessary. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- John Zmirak makes his weekly appearance and covers current events and shares recent articles available at- https://stream.org/author/johnzmirak/ Watch Eric Metaxas on Rumble- https://rumble.com/c/TheEricMetaxasRadioShow The Eric Metaxas Show- https://metaxastalk.com/podcasts/ Eric Metaxas Show on Apple Podcasts- https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-eric-metaxas-show/id991156680 Check out- Socrates in the City Find All of John Zmirak Articles at- https://stream.org/author/johnzmirak/ John Zmirak is a senior editor at The Stream and author or co-author of ten books, including The Politically Incorrect Guide to Immigration and The Politically Incorrect Guide to Catholicism. He is co-author with Jason Jones of “God, Guns, & the Government.” John Zmirak's new book: No Second Amendment, No First by John Zmirak Available March 19, 2024 Today's Left endlessly preaches the evils of “gun violence." It is a message increasingly echoed from the nation's pulpits, presented as common-sense decency and virtue. Calls for “radical non-violence” are routinely endowed with the imprimatur of religious doctrine. But what if such teachings were misguided, even damaging? What if the potential of a citizenry to exercise force against violent criminals and tyrannical governments is not just compatible with church teaching, but flows from the very heart of Biblical faith and reason? What if the freedoms we treasure are intimately tied to the power to resist violent coercion? This is the long-overdue case John Zmirak makes with stunning clarity and conviction in No Second Amendment, No First. A Yale-educated journalist and former college professor, Zmirak shows how the right of self-defense against authoritarian government was affirmed in both the Old and New Testaments, is implied in Natural Law, and has been part of Church tradition over the centuries. Zmirak further shows how today's mounting threats to the gun rights guaranteed by the Second Amendment are inexorably linked to the Article from John Zmirak. Elon and His Team Inside the Deep State Are Frodo and Sam in Mordor By John Zmirak Published on February 12, 2025 John Zmirak The more we see our country's ruling elites in action, using unelected judges to twist the Constitution and deprive our elected president of his legitimate authority, the more crucial it is for us to embrace a paradigm shift. We must change how we see our government and the system we now live under — radically. Perhaps because for the past three Mondays I've been viewing the extended, almost four-hour versions of Peter Jackson's masterful The Lord of Rings trilogy, I can't help viewing the paradigm shift we need in Tolkien's mythic terms. Put bluntly, we don't live in Gondor under the flawed steward Denethor anymore, as we did in past decades. Or even in Rohan, with King Theoden bewitched by his evil advisor Wormtongue (and behind him the wizard Saruman). We live in Mordor. Yes, it's a place where elves and the Men of the West have just scored a rare, if incomplete victory. But the war is far from over. The rulers of Mordor weaponized the COVID panic to impose a public health dictatorship, lock us in our homes, close our churches, censor our media, force untested vaccines into our arms, kill our seniors by dumping virus patients in nursing homes, then incincerating them as medical waste, graft the cells of newly aborted babies onto the scalps of mice (using taxpayer funds, approved by Regime evangelical Francis Collins, never criticized by globalist Pope Francis), steal the 2020 election, and imprison peaceful protestors. The people who did all that weren't misguided, overzealous, or grossly misinformed. They were orcs, and their leaders were Nazgul. They were hungry for absolute power — and for a while they seemed to have it. At least they acted that way — as if the whip would always be in their hands no matter what we did. That's why such people felt entitled to gloat when patriotic black entrepreneur Hermann Cain died of COVID after attending a Donald Trump rally, even as they unleashed mobs of looters and rioters on our cities in honor of career criminal George Floyd. And now those same elites are using their top-notch legal teams and biased judges to cling to every scrap of money and power they took from us during the years of that dictatorship the same way that Communist judges in Poland clung to their privileges after Solidarity got elected and loyal Nazis tried to keep their privileges after 1945. How else to explain a federal judge telling the appointed, duly confirmed Secretary of the Treasury that he can't view his own department's computer files? Or demanding that race-based discrimination be reimposed — against the president's policies? As I watched The Return of the King, with Frodo and Sam cautiously working their way into the heart of Sauron's kingdom, aiming to hurl the corrupting Ring of Power into the fires where it was forged, I couldn't help thinking of the hobbits attempting to do the same for us right now: Elon Musk and his plucky team of brilliant young hackers and analysts. They're the ones exposing the “humanitarian” programs of USAID that tried to convince young African boys that they might be trans, to intimidate Latin American governments into legalizing abortion, and to censor the global media in support of the COVID lockdowns and the useless Ukraine war. Just yesterday, the news broke that in only three weeks, they've saved American taxpayers a BILLION dollars — the vast majority of it coming from cutting DEI efforts within government programs. And now Musk's team members are being hunted, getting doxed and demonized in our media, with corrupt prosecutors and judges seeking ways to cripple their efforts and maybe even arrest them (as they arrested and imprisoned Steve Bannon and Peter Navarro). What can we do on these heroes' behalf? First of all we can pray, and it's our duty to get busy doing that. Secondly we can emulate what Aragorn, Gandalf, and the other heroes did after defending Minas Tirith: They marched to Sauron's gate, braved the full force of his armies, and took his attention away from the genuine threat he faced. We must do a similar service for Trump and his team. We must loudly support whatever peaceful measures, whatever innovative deployment of presidential power he attempts, to defy these biased judges and impose the will of the people — as expressed in the 2024 election, which the orcs weren't able to steal. Pope Francis Goes Full Alexander VI, Appointing Leftist Bishops Who Wield Excommunication Threats A pope more interested in leftist politics than in maintaining his church's historic teachings or protecting children from harm has started meddling directly in the enforcement of our country's just, democratically enacted laws: The Vatican has appointed Edward Weisenburger to be Archbishop of Detroit. As Lifesitenews reports: In 2018, at the USCCB's Spring Assembly in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, the prelate suggested that Catholics who “are involved” in the detention of immigrants and separation of families at the U.S. border might receive “canonical penalties” usually used in “life issues” cases, which could include excommunication. “For the salvation of these people's souls, maybe it's time for us to look at canonical penalties,” Weisenburger claimed at the time. In other words, if you're a Catholic who advocates for a secure U.S. border and only legal immigration going forward, this guy wants to see you excommunicated. Make no mistake, Weisenburger spent the COVID panic serving the Nazgul and the orcs: The 64-year-old Weisenburger, a canon lawyer, was among the most stringent in America in applying restrictions on the faithful during the COVID crisis, closing churches and implementing mask mandates in the spring of 2020 while encouraging Catholics to take the abortion-tainted COVID-19 jabs. Weisenburger released a statement in September 2021 instructing all priests within his Arizona diocese “not to cooperate with any individuals seeking our endorsement of an exemption from vaccine or facemask mandates based specifically upon our Catholic faith.” He added that “[a]ll current anti-COVID-19 vaccines may be received by the faithful without moral compromise.” Upon reopening churches to public Masses in October 2020, the bishop stressed that the dispensation from attendance “remains in place and I have consistently encouraged those identified by the Centers for Disease Control as ‘at-risk' to not attend Mass in person, but rather to view a televised or internet Mass from home.” He also issued a directive to priests not to distribute Holy Communion in the mouth and to only hear the Sacrament of Confession outdoors. Later, in 2021, Weisenburger signed a letter alongside eight other U.S. prelates aligning themselves with the LGBT activist group Tyler Clementi Foundation, which seeks to “reduce the shame and stigma” of homosexual lifestyles. In line with Pope Francis, the archbishop-elect has also made “climate change” a central issue, calling it a matter of “life and death” and thanking the Pope for focusing on the topic in his encyclical Laudato Si' and subsequent apostolic exhortation Laudate Deum. The Pope Rebukes J.D. Vance for Repeating Real Catholic Doctrine Pope Francis has gone further, issuing a document implicitly rebuking Vice President J.D. Vance (a Catholic convert) for reiterating traditional Catholic (and perennial Christian teaching) that we owe special duties to our families, neighbors, and fellow citizens that we don't owe to foreign invaders or fake asylum seekers. In his statement, Francis condemns “any measure that tacitly or explicitly identifies the illegal status of some migrants with criminality.” Never mind that the Catholic Catechism teaches that to earn the right to welcome, immigrants must obey their new countries' laws. According to Francis, doing illegal things isn't “criminal,” and if you can't wrap your mind around that logic, you might find yourself outside the church. Will patriotic Catholics cave at the threat of unjust (and therefore in God's eyes, null and void) excommunications? Not if they're like Trump's border czar Tom Homan: Don't miss Jules Gomes's coverage later this morning of the corrupt, scandal-plagued Vatican aid agency CARITAS, which soaks up U.S. taxpayer money and whose leader is joining Francis's chorus of sycophants denouncing American law and demanding that Catholics flout it. Along The Stream… Up later this morning, be sure to watch the great Naomi Wolf expose the extent to which forced vaccination laws backed by Big Pharma still impinge on parents' rights to watch over their children's health. Also later today, Pastor Shane Idleman offers a powerful video message on biblical self-discipline, self-control, and the corporal means we can use to achieve those, including fasting. John Zmirak is a senior editor at The Stream and author or coauthor of 14 books, including The Politically Incorrect Guide to Immigration and The Politically Incorrect Guide to Catholicism. His newest book is No Second Amendment, No First.

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Week 072 - Third Age Thursday: The Lore of Living Creatures

lore pippin aragorn ents gondor third age living creatures

Play Episode Listen Later Feb 13, 2025 11:38

Aragorn longs for Gondor and a crown buried for a thousand years; Merry and Pippin long to be included in a list of people who don't get squished by Ents. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The Fellowship of the Ring: Ch 16-18

Harry Potter and the First Time Readers

Play Episode Listen Later Feb 10, 2025 91:27

Chapter 16 - A Journey in the Dark‘The road that I speak of leads to the Mines of Moria,' said Gandalf. Only Gimli lifted up his head; a smouldering fire was in his eyes. On all the others a dread fell at the mention of that name. Even to the hobbits it was a legend of vague fear.Q1 - What do you think of Moria…it seems darker than I expected.Turning to the others he said: ‘While I am searching, will you each make ready to enter the Mines? For here I fear we must say farewell to our good beast of burden. You must lay aside much of the stuff that we brought against bitter weather: you will not need it inside, nor, I hope, when we come through and journey on down into the South. Instead each of us must take a share of what the pony carried, especially the food and the water-skins.' ‘But you can't leave poor old Bill behind in this forsaken place, Mr. Gandalf!' cried Sam, angry and distressed. ‘I won't have it, and that's flat. After he has come so far and all!' ‘I am sorry, Sam,' said the wizard. ‘But when the Door opens I do not think you will be able to drag your Bill inside, into the long dark of Moria. You will have to choose between Bill and your master.' ‘He'd follow Mr. Frodo into a dragon's den, if I led him,' protested Sam. ‘It'd be nothing short of murder to turn him loose with all these wolves about.' ‘It will be short of murder, I hope,' said Gandalf. He laid his hand on the pony's head, and spoke in a low voice. ‘Go with words of guard and guiding on you,' he said. ‘You are a wise beast, and have learned much in Rivendell. Make your ways to places where you can find grass, and so come in time to Elrond's house, or wherever you wish to go. ‘There, Sam! He will have quite as much chance of escaping wolves and getting home as we have.'Q2 - Was there magic in what Gandalf said?Q3 - What do you think of the wolves that came on them?Q4 - What do you think of them getting into Moria?Q5 - I missed it, but did Bill the pony die?Chapter 17 - The Bridge of Khazad-Dûm‘It is grim reading,' he said. ‘I fear their end was cruel. Listen! We cannot get out. We cannot get out. They have taken the Bridge and second hall. Fra´r and Lo´ni and Na´li fell there. Then there are four lines smeared so that I can only read went 5 days ago. The last lines run the pool is up to the wall at Westgate. The Watcher in the Water took O´ in. We cannot get out. The end comes, and then drums, drums in the deep. I wonder what that means. The last thing written is in a trailing scrawl of elf-letters: they are coming. There is nothing more.' Gandalf paused and stood in silent thought.Q1 - This is such a creepy section.Q2 - What do you think of this whole chapters tone?What it was could not be seen: it was like a great shadow, in the middle of which was a dark form, of man-shape maybe, yet greater; and a power and terror seemed to be in it and to go before it.Q3 - What do you think of the Balrog?The Balrog reached the bridge. Gandalf stood in the middle of the span, leaning on the staff in his left hand, but in his other hand Glamdring gleamed, cold and white. His enemy halted again, facing him, and the shadow about it reached out like two vast wings. It raised the whip, and the thongs whined and cracked. Fire came from its nostrils. But Gandalf stood firm.With a bound the Balrog leaped full upon the bridge. Its whip whirled and hissed. ‘He cannot stand alone!' cried Aragorn suddenly and ran back along the bridge. ‘Elendil!' he shouted. ‘I am with you, Gandalf!' ‘Gondor!' cried Boromir and leaped after him.Q4 - I love that Aragorn and Boromir stood to try to fight with Gandalf.With a terrible cry the Balrog fell forward, and its shadow plunged down and vanished. But even as it fell it swung its whip, and the thongs lashed and curled about the wizard's knees, dragging him to the brink. He staggered and fell, grasped vainly at the stone, and slid into the abyss. ‘Fly, you fools!' he cried, and was gone.Q5 - It wasnt Gandalf's choice?Chapter 18 - LothlorianQ1 - What do you think of Lothlorian?Q2 - What do you think about the elves that live their and their laws with dwarves?At the hill's foot Frodo found Aragorn, standing still and silent as a tree; but in his hand was a small golden bloom of elanor, and a light was in his eyes. He was wrapped in some fair memory: and as Frodo looked at him he knew that he beheld things as they once had been in this same place. For the grim years were removed from the face of Aragorn, and he seemed clothed in white, a young lord tall and fair; and he spoke words in the Elvish tongue to one whom Frodo could not see. Arwen vanimelda, nama´rie¨! he said, and then he drew a breath, and returning out of his thought he looked at Frodo and smiled. ‘Here is the heart of Elvendom on earth,' he said, ‘and here my heart dwells ever, unless there be a light beyond the dark roads that we still must tread, you and I. Come with me!' And taking Frodo's hand in his, he left the hill of Cerin Amroth and came there never again as living man.Q3 - What is going on here?

358 – Oath of No Return

kings lord of the rings rings wrapping aragorn gondor denethor

Play Episode Listen Later Feb 9, 2025 104:34

The Steward of Gondor and the Lord of the Éothéod swear oaths to one another; Alan and Matt simply try not to swear at one another. Join us as Eorl knows it's time to ‘show the way and leave today' in the fifth of our six episodes covering Cirion & Eorl. The Prince of Dol Amroth discovers the reason for the awe on the Hill of Awe, Eorl swears such an oath that we can only ever know the translation, and Cirion returns the favor by invoking the name of Eru for the first time in 2500 years. We wonder if Eorl's oath was in alliterative verse, speculate about when to celebrate Rohan Day, and agree that Cirion is highly underrated. Also, let's make Christmas carols in Quenya a thing. Sign up for your one-dollar-per-month trial period at shopify.com/pony. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Kings and Rings

InkleDeux Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Feb 5, 2025 37:02

Wrapping up their look at examples of priests, prophets, and kings in the Lord of the Rings, AJ and Brandon compare the rule of Aragorn and Denethor, steward of Gondor. They also crystalize some of the patterns between all three offices and think about what that means for their own lives.

Bricking News! January 25th - 31st, 2025

Back 2 Brick LEGO® Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Jan 31, 2025 21:53

On this week's Bricking News, we're diving into all the big reveals from International LEGO Day! Mattel came out swinging with a surprising move, LEGO unveiled another stunning Van Gogh-inspired art piece, and rumors are swirling about more Star Wars: Rebuild the Galaxy sets. Plus, we'll cover all the latest LEGO news you won't want to miss. Tune in for all the brick-breaking updates! Check out my YouTube channel! - YouTube.comSupport my Ideas entries with COMMENTS!Men in Black NeuralyzerMagic School BusSet Review: 10342 Pretty Pink Flower Bouquet Rebrickable Moc Review: Tales of Gondor by Brick_Lizard AT-AT Driver HelmetFebruary shopping listIcons Restaurants of the WorldSpider-man bookOne PieceModular building posterRebuild the GalaxySlave 1 payscaleMinecraft movieBricklink series 3 shippingVan Gogh SunflowersFree sunflowersAlabama's first storeBotanical bundleMattel...Brickshelf shutting downThank you, Patrons! - Bellefonte Bricks Studio, Jimmy Tucker, Ryan S, David, Matthew Vanden Boogart, Paul Snellen, Lee Jackson, Pop's Block ShopSupport the showSee some of the designs I've built - REBRICKABLE.COMHead over to Back2brick.com for links to the latest LEGO set discounts!Support the podcast through our affiliate links AND join the Back 2 Brick Patreon!Have a question? Want to be a guest? Send me a message!backtobrick@gmail.comBack 2 Brick Podcast is not an affiliate nor endorsed by the LEGO Group.LEGO, the LEGO logo, the Minifigure, and the Brick and Knob configurations are trademarks of the LEGO Group of Companies. ©2023 The LEGO Group.

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356 – Hold On

Lore of the Rings | Wander the world of JRR Tolkien

Play Episode Listen Later Jan 26, 2025 115:34

Cirion uses his Phone-a-Friend lifeline and, fortunately, Eorl picks up; Alan uses his Phone-a-friend lifeline and… Matt picks up. Join us as Cirion sees that the end of Gondor is “closer than you think and you're standing on the brink” in our third of six episodes on Cirion & Eorl. The Northmen contribute blood to Gondor, Borondir becomes a legend, and Galadriel runs interference for the good guys. We long to hear the unwritten songs, admire how Tolkien's heroes do the right thing because it's the right thing, and think that Ruckus in Rhovanion would be a great name for a fight. Also, hobbit strike zones and the new paladin ability: smell evil. Control Body Odor ANYWHERE with @shop.mando and get $5 off off your Starter Pack (that's over 40% off) with promo code pony at mandopodcast.com/pony! #mandopod Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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196: From Rascal to King | Tolkien's Fellowship of the Ring | Book 1 Chap 10 Part 3

Play Episode Listen Later Jan 16, 2025 6:08

In this final deep dive into the chapter "Strider" from J.R.R. Tolkien's Fellowship of the Ring, we explore how Tolkien transformed a mysterious character into the iconic hero, Aragorn. Discover the subtle hints of Aragorn's destiny, the foreshadowing of major events like the Black Breath, and the theme of hope intricately woven into the narrative. Join Aaron as he unravels the layers of meaning behind Strider's revelation, his role as the heir of Isildur, and his journey from a mere ranger to the king of Gondor.Who are you?What's the best day for you to listen to new episodes? Tell me here: ringspodcast.com/newTell me more about you! ringspodcast.com/feedbackWander FartherDownload my free chapter guide for "Strider": ringspodcast.com/striderDeals for you, my fellow wandererExclusive discount for Lore of the Rings Listeners: 25% off your entire order at Manly Bands. Details at https://www.ringspodcast.com/p/rings/Download my FREE guide for reading Tolkien's Silmarillion: https://ringspodcast.kit.com/a982347493About the Lore of the Rings PodcastContact the show, donate, and find past episodes: ringspodcast.comEmbark on an immersive journey through the captivating realms of J.R.R. Tolkien's Middle-earth, where the epic sagas of the Lord of the Rings, the Hobbit, the Silmarillion, and Unfinished Tales, and more come to life. Join us as we delve into the rich tapestry of Tolkien's masterful storytelling, drawing intriguing comparisons between his literary works and the cinematic adaptations crafted by Peter Jackson. Be at the forefront of the latest developments as we explore the highly anticipated Rings of Power series from Amazon. Prepare to be enthralled as we uncover hidden connections, untold tales, and delve into the depths of Middle-earth lore. Tune in now and become part of our fellowship on this extraordinary journey!This podcast is not affiliated with the Tolkien Estate.Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/ringspodcast/donationsAdvertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

196: From Rascal to King | Tolkien's Fellowship of the Ring | Book 1 Chap 10 Part 3

Lore of the Rings | Wander the world of JRR Tolkien

Play Episode Listen Later Jan 16, 2025 6:08

354 – Fight Fire With Northmen

Play Episode Listen Later Jan 12, 2025 84:02

The story of Cirion and Eorl begins with an introduction to the Northmen; the story of Alan and Matt begins with Matt having to pronounce hard words. Join us as the Northmen have nothing to lose ‘cause it's already lost, as we begin our six-episode sidebar on Cirion and Eorl and the Friendship of Gondor and Rohan — can we just call it Cirion & Eorl? Narmacil II loses badly, the Northmen form the Éothéod, and the Great Plague sets everyone back a century. We learn that about Tolkien's trench fever, talk about the importance of rearguard actions, and explain the Undeeps. Also, Alan admits he's pedantic. Control Body Odor ANYWHERE with @shop.mando and get $5 off off your Starter Pack (that's over 40% off) with promo code pony at mandopodcast.com/pony! #mandopod Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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353 – They Should've Known

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Play Episode Listen Later Jan 5, 2025 126:50

Gondor and Rohan honestly believed in Saruman, while Alan and Matt aren't sure what to believe anymore. Join The Man of the West and The Nerd of the Rings as we look at all the Kings of Rohan, and Matt gives Alan his new nickname. Saruman's gets the keys to his new place, Aldor the Old is what it says on the tin, and no one has anything good to say about Fengel. We start with a review of the new film, The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim, wish we could pronounce Old English, and wonder if kings should choose more peaceful hobbies. Also, we talk about Tolkien and AI (no AI used in the generation of this blurb). Control Body Odor ANYWHERE with @shop.mando and get $5 off off your Starter Pack (that's over 40% off) with promo code pony at mandopodcast.com/pony! #mandopod Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

King Theoden and Being a Leader [E164] - Diagnosing the Aftermarket A to Z

Remarkable Results Radio Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Dec 11, 2024 30:53

Thanks to our Partner, NAPA Autotech Matt Fanslow draws leadership lessons from King Théoden of Rohan in "The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers." Matt explores themes of trust, fear, and alliances, paralleling Théoden's journey with the challenges faced by shop owners and leaders in the automotive industry. He emphasizes the importance of trusting the right advisors, seeking support, and fostering collaboration. By reflecting on Théoden's transformation and battles, Matt provides valuable insights on effective leadership, resilience, and the power of unity in overcoming adversity.Show NotesThéoden's Condition (00:02:41)Trust and Leadership (00:04:11)Gandalf's Return (00:05:38)Théoden's Struggles (00:06:55)The Threat from Sauron (00:08:15)Historical Comforts (00:09:34)Rebuilding Alliances (00:11:54)Facing Business Challenges (00:13:01)Helm's Deep as a Safe Haven (00:14:08)The Arrival of Allies (00:15:15)Role of Employees in Alliances (00:16:36)Impenetrability of Helm's Deep (00:18:05)The Rallying Call (00:20:24)The Burden of Leadership (00:21:35)Competition as a Catalyst (00:22:38)The Charge to Gondor (00:23:47)Motivational Speeches (00:25:10)The Price of Honor (00:26:26)Contentment in Leadership (00:27:28)Striving for Belonging (00:28:40)"Ask Us Anything!" with Matt Fanslow and Brin Kline

THE ARGONATH: Pillars of the Kings

The Council of Elrond

Play Episode Listen Later Dec 7, 2024 45:05

Today the Mellon Heads discuss the Argonath, the immense gateway into the northern border of Gondor. This striking entrance is one of the most memorable visuals from Peter Jackson's trilogy and it is steeped in history and intrigue. Learn about who these Kings of Men were and much more. Also, listen out for an exciting update on the upcoming Middle-earth movie "The War of the Rohirrim". Don't forget to like and subscribe!

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Rohan and the Rohirrim

SQPN: Secrets of Middle-earth

Play Episode Listen Later Dec 3, 2024 85:49

Explore with Thomas Salerno, Patrick Mason, and Jeff Haecker the rich history and culture of Rohan including its founding, the Oath of Friendship with Gondor, and the pivotal role it plays in the War of the Ring, as well as the upcoming War of the Rohirrim movie, delving into Helm Hammerhand's tragic tale and speculating on the adaptation's portrayal of Rohan's epic struggles. The post Rohan and the Rohirrim appeared first on StarQuest Media.

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350 – Wanted Dead Or Alive

Play Episode Listen Later Nov 24, 2024 121:01

The Stewardship of Gondor became hereditary as a kingship; should the PPP co-hosts follow suit? Join The Man of the West and The Obscure Lord of the Rings Facts Guy on his last episode this season as the Stewards of Gondor harden their hearts against the return of a king, any king. Cirion looks for an answer, and decides to phone a friend; the Stewards keep Gondor the same, only the names will change; and Thorongil has good advice for Ecthelion. Alan finds another excuse to read Quenya, while Don looks for his copy of Parmesan Eggplant #17, and we realize we don't use “bereft” enough. Also, Mount Doom has a funny start button. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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349 – I'll Be There For You

power west council rings unfortunate events gondor glorfindel

Play Episode Listen Later Nov 17, 2024 104:16

The Wainriders strike Gondor, leaving them without a king for a time, while Don's old jokes leave Alan to cry a thousand rivers. Join The Man of the West and the Obscure Lord of the Rings Facts Guy as the arrival of the Wainriders triggers a series of Unfortunate Events. Eärnil saves the day for Gondor, but not for Arthedain, Malbeth has some important words, and Glorfindel could afford to be more specific. We observe that if you knock Gondor down then it gets up again, note a little passive-aggressive “per my last email” tone from the Council of Gondor, and make our own Rings of Power prophecy. Also, is Don even old enough to go to a pub? Magic Mind: You have a limited offer you can use now, that gets you up to 48% off your first subscription or 20% off one time purchases with code PONY20 at checkout. You can claim it at: https://www.magicmind.com/PONY20 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

348 – You Give Love a Bad Name