I make crocheted mousies. They are very cute, and they are available for sale.

If you want to see more pictures, they’re under my “crocheting” tag.

Acrylic yarn for the exterior, polyester fill for the interior; if you’d want something different, we can discuss it.

I can do mousies in the colours of most Pride flags, not just the ones shown; if you’re wondering about a particular one, feel free to ask.

I charge five dollars per mousie, plus the cost of shipping (ten dollars for a “small package”). Specifically for Pride month, instead of charging per mousie, I ask for a donation in that amount to Amnesty International; I would be making zero profit off of this. For larger orders I’ll also lower how much I charge you for shipping; I recommend finding someone to share an order with, if you only want one or two.

Interested? Send me a message and we can talk.

May 2021 update: Pride mousies are available year-round, at the listed rate. The only change is that now the free pattern is up, here, if anyone wants to make their own mousies. I also make dice pouches in Pride colours.

"Guy" and "man" have different connotations with adjectival nouns. Like "tree guy" = arborist but "tree man" = he lives in a tree, or maybe he is a tree.

"I know a guy" = "I have a useful contact."

"I know a man" = "I am about to tell you a story."

“He’s a great guy” = he is pleasant and fun and well-intentioned

“He’s a great man” = he has saved countless lives and changed the world irrevocably

God talking about magic in Tolkien you know I thought I kinda had it settled in my head, I’d accepted it’s kind of rare and unknowable nature you know? But then I reread Concerning Hobbits and like…

There’s a sentence that basically says ‘Hobbits didn’t study magic because they just didn’t go in for that sort of thing’ which fucks me up royally because it gives us two pieces of information.

- Magic can be studied 

- Hobbits COULD have had magic but they didn’t want it

I’ve been assuming that Magic’s some inherent thing that requires a process of making and some element of mysticism and a little Valar influence thrown in but no! No apparently you can just read a book like… this isn’t HoME stuff this is Lord of the Rings secure 100% accepted canon material that we now have to just deal with! This means fucking Pippin could have been a Wizard if he’d studied hard enough! We have to process that! John! Did you ever think of that?! 

also, Dwarves have magic. apparently. they can put curses on things. he just.. casually threw that one out there and never mentioned it again.

Yeah!!! Like the Shire just has a bunch of stated ‘clearly magical’ toys all about the shop. Like! What!

The dwarves of yore made mighty spells/ while hammers fell like ringing bells 

You don’t even need to go back to yore! Good ole jirt just casually mentions in passing in ‘the hobbit’ that thorin’s company buried the troll gold and put lots of spells over it (I said curses by mistake up there but the book has ‘spells’) and then kept traveling. Like…wait. Jirt. Pls.

To my mind that’s an attractive thing about magic / enchantment /spells in Tolkien.  It’s not a huge ‘wow look at that’ worldbuilding thing.  It’s subtle and part of the world itself, so that you barely notice it.  Magic in Middle-earth is almost like electricity: it does a lot, but people don’t stand around hitting each other with mains electrical cables, or say things like ‘I shall use my electricity to contact you from afar!’.  Because it’s built-in and normal (I think we are seeing this transition with the word ‘internet’ too: I think it’s a word less used than it used to be, because now it’s intrinsic.  We don’t ‘look on the internet’ any more, we google or check FB or go on Wikipedia or discord…).  The words are artfully used too: look out for where he uses ‘spells’  ‘enchantment’  ‘magic’  ‘sorcery’  ‘wizardry’  ‘curses’ : all of these have different etymologies and that relates to exactly how Tolkien uses them.  

I don’t think Pippin could easily become a wizard, exactly, because that’s a word that began with the meaning ‘philosopher or sage’. It’s more or less the same as the term ‘The Wise’.  Sam Gamgee picks up an air of ‘Gandalf, of wizards’ about Faramir, and Faramir suggests that perhaps he sees something of Numenor.  

But Pippin probably *could* learn to do things that hobbits would call magic, or spells. In fact, in Lorien, when Sam says that he’s interested in the Elvish rope, one of the Elves helping to load the boats says it’s a pity he hadn’t mentioned it earlier since they would have ‘taught him much’.  Given that we later see the rope shines against the sudden dark that came over Frodo, and came when Sam called it, it might well be that if Sam had learned rope-making in Lorien, it would have included things that he would call spells.  But no doubt the Elves would just call it ‘making ropes’.  You can see it might be difficult to find a tutor in magic if everyone you ask about magic goes : ‘no idea. I hear these other guys can do all sorts of mysterious stuff, but it’s all just basic ropemaking here.’ 

The thing which is really innate is power level; but Tolkien’s magic is to a large extent, magic tangled up with *making* and *growing*.  Things that everyone who has the Secret Fire of Anor in them can do.  I expect that things which Hobbits wouldn’t consider magic is part of how the Shire grows enough food to be able to basically eat six times a day.

Any creative act is, to some degree, an act of magic, formalized or not, in Middle-Earth.

It is my personal headcanon that one of Elrond’s sons showed up at the hobbits’ house in Minas Tirith and said, “Look, it didn’t make it into any of the ominous prophetic messages, but Grandad said you were really keen on Galadhrim ropemaking techniques and didn’t have time to learn any in Lothlórien, so… do you have time now?” And Sam said yes, actually, thanks, I do!

Sam and Rosie and Frodo had thirteen children, and while Elanor became Queen Arwen’s handmaiden and keeper of the Red Book, and Frodo-lad inherited Bag End and perhaps his father’s work, the others must have done something with their lives. I propose that Gardner, Gamgee & Co. was the finest purveyor of elven definitely-not-magic rope in Arnor for several centuries thereafter.

Tags by @eregyrn-falls:

#lot of good thoughts in here #the question of Wizards is interesting because afaicr it's a proper noun rather than a general noun; right? #like: there are only Five Wizards; “wizard” is not a codified term for just any magic-user trained in a certain way #it's basically just for These Five Maiar #(am i wrong on that? must look it up) #and the way things pan out it makes me wonder if “sorcerer” works similarly; see also: Necromancer #Sauron after all is a Maiar who uses a bunch of different types of magic but nobody ever refers to HIM as a wizard #even though he has a lot in common with Gandalf and Saruman etc. if you're looking at it from the outside #alternatively let's ponder “The Witch King of Angmar” because… witches? what??? #JRR what does that even mean in the context of Middle Earth #and why is it being applied to a KING #(another thing to refresh my memory on i guess; i always thought it meant #that he was a King with witch-y powers in some sense; perhaps related to his ring #i never thought it might mean that he was a king over witches -- i.e. that he had a bunch of servants who were “witches”; but hmm) #and then you have Gimli referring to Galadriel as an “elf witch”; which at least is a more expected use of the term #ANYWAY #all of that to say that beyond these terms it really IS interesting how magic may be something that happens all around #but people don't think of it as such; even though they may regard the doings of a neighbor race or kingdom as being “magical” #because what THEY do isn't a part of their own lives and thus it stands out #and i like the idea that the magic of the hobbits is in their making the results of their planting and husbandry super abundant

changing my mindset from “if I don’t keep my home clean i’m a useless horrible failure” to “i deserve to live in a comfortable, clean environment, so i will do my best to provide myself with that” has been fairly life changing

and it applies to so much!!!! i try to take whatever i’m beating myself up over, like “i haven’t been eating enough veggies lately so i suck as a human,” and instead reframe it as “my body deserves all the important nutrients found in vegetables” and suddenly i’m ten billion times more inclined to actually prioritize eating more veggies

shame is a paralytic!!!!! self compassion is an actual motivator!!!!!

Rule #1 of fiber arts: you need to know how to count

Rule #2 of fiber arts: you do not know how to count

Rule #3 of fiber arts: to make sure you are counting correctly, you must recount enough times to guarantee you got it right

Rule#4 of fiber arts: it will never be enough

it’s not ‘talking to myself’ it’s called a soliloquy you fuck

#it’s only a soliloquy if it’s in verse #otherwise it’s just a sparkling mental breakdown

i feel like a lot of fandoms pride themselves on being gayer than the source material but have they considered being less racist and less misogynistic than the source material as well . could be revolutionary

oh your pronouns are he/they?

well that’s mathematically incorrect becuase you can still simplify the fraction since both sides have “he”

making your pronouns technically 1/ty

>:)

some of you are not cis and the thing is that you don't even have to do anything about it. you can just be like "damn that's crazy" and move on with your life. you don't have to change your name. you don't have to change your pronouns. you don't have to choose which flavor of not-cis you are. you don't have to change your wardrobe. you don't have to come out or cut your hair or reinvent yourself. you can just be like "huh neato!" and let that be that. you don't owe anyone a performance of your queerness. not even other queer people. ok that's all thank you and goodbye

"You don't owe anyone a performance of your queermess."

Crag just invented wheel. Crag show you, left it up on top of hill

Crag swear to the spirits Crag left wheel right there but now it gone!! No idea ehat happen to it

weird thing hit gork :(

Probably nothing

head hurt

masturbation is evil not for any puritan anti-fun reason but because it has permanently claimed so many verbs

nobody can crank anything anymore. and god forbid you jerk

turning off rbs at 75k btw so get your last reblogs in now

😞

A travesty

do you think two pennies is still enough for the ferryman or has inflation driven up the fare

if he makes me use an app I am simply not crossing the river Styx.

i told my dad the joke “dad jokes are just mom jokes that a man repeated louder” and he thought it was hilarious. he turned to my mother, intending to relay the joke to her, and a bare second after he opened his mouth i watched it dawn on his face that he was about to become the subject of the joke. when i tell you that man was slackjawed as he turned back to me, like he had an entire life altering realization in the span of about 20 seconds.

yesterday a reporter for the new york times tragically passed away after contracting a case of indirectness poisoning obtained when too much of an article was written in the third person passive, sources say. much sadness and mourning is being performed by family and friends

It's freaky how the brain will just plasticly learn novel motor output interfaces on the fly. It's almost like instead of hard coding a control scheme for anatomy that changes every few million years the strat that brains went for was to be openly reconfigurable to fit around whatever its nerves seem to be hooked up to via observed feedback.

I think they've done tests on this by getting people to pilot novel bodies in VR. But you don't tend to notice it day to day until something weird happens like just now. I was reading a paper book and it had a line of text blacked out as if redacted. Instinctively I go to move my cursor over the black line to see if I can read any text if I highlight it.

Except it's a book and not my computer screen, so the cursor my brain thinks it's moving across my field of vision in front of me doesn't exist. At the same time, my right hand is making a bunch of small involuntary movements next to me. I didn't intend to move it and didn't even notice it was moving until I saw it with my eyes. What I intended to move was my Cursor, something that my brain had learned to understand that it has, and the way it moves this is by actuating the muscles in my right arm, an action that is entirely disconnected from any intent to move my arm, which is a different thing.

I love being a pattern atop this eldritch mess of neurons, it's great

father I cannot click the book

printers behave like that because the medieval monks they put out of work are haunting them