Home is behind, the world is ahead

And there are many paths to tread.

Once you start looking for ‘people who ignore the outside world are destroyed by it’ themes in Tolkien, they’re everywhere.

Nargothrond, Gondolin, and narrowly averted in the Shire.

The Silmarillion is not as well polished as the LotR, and one way to see it is in the twists. The hobbits of the Shire didn’t want to pay attention to the outside world, like the elves of the first age. They turned inward and bent their efforts on the doing of good things. They mastered their crafts, took care of their people, and paid attention to their own histories and doings. And doom came to them.

But because several hobbits did get involved in the outside world, catastrophe passed from the Shire. Gondolin and Nargothrond fell. That twist is the mark of a well-polished novel, unlike the beautiful but somewhat protoformed stories of earlier books.

The wood elves of Mirkwood got off surprisingly easily.

Myers-Biggs

Is astrology for the pseudo-scientifically inclined.

“It’s not my fault; I’m an INT-J!”

Oh, sod off. Go back to Pisces-ville and your healing crystals.

Exponential Idle: The Logistics Function

The fastest way to manual the LM after publishing is to turn C2 cut off. Select the tree lines by ‘Buy All’, tap the [-] box next to C2. Then set purchase amount to max. The number of levels of upgrade you can afford will go up by one or two, pause, and then rush up by a lot. After that it will pause again and go up by a few. A few might be from 200 to 220 or 150 to 165. Buy immediately after that little jump. Wait again. Keep doing that until it doesn’t really jump any more. At that point, usually when tau_5 is 90% of peak or so, turn autobuy back on.

Names

One of the reasons Tolkien’s work was so popular was the way he named everything. The names themselves were fantastic, but the mere fact they were named at all mattered.

Gandalf burned through staves, but his sword, Glamdring the Foe Hammer, is what sticks.

Engineering

The problem with engineering is that before you know how to do something, it’s sorcery. It’s an inscrutable mystery, hidden by ancient lore, and inconceivable to all humankind.

After you know how to do something, it’s so obvious you can’t figure out what the problem was in the first place.

Dark Age Fantasy

The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant reached the apex of ego-centric, dark age fantasy. While Thomas Covenant wasn’t as vile as Elric, didn’t cause the death-count of Corwin, the Land was more about him than any of the others.

That’s really what that spin on the genre was. Stories purely about one character, and not about anyone else.