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    • AMMDI is an open-notebook hypertext writing experiment, authored by Mike Travers aka mtraven. It's a work in progress and some parts are more polished than others. Comments welcome! More.
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  • Weird Studies

    • Weird Studies/LotR

    05 Mar 2026 - 10 Sep 2026
    Open in Logseq

      • Magic Mirror: On J.R.R. Tolkien's 'The Fellowship of the Ring'

        • Some stuff about genre and snobbery, argh, who cares, that stuff is old hat. Are there any high-culture snobs left? The academy has embraced not only genre fiction but even lower forms like fan fiction eg in Henry Jenkins.
        • The world as made of language.
        • Good and evil – unlike lesser works, the morality is not easy.
        • They do mention Thiel and Palantir (dismisively)
        • Episodes on the other volumes to come!

      • The Two Towers

        • All fiction is weird
        • At thos point, the characters realize that they are in a story "the world has all grown strange"
        • Characters must be extraordinary in these times (reminds me of nobility )]
        • The crack about renaming the podcast "America" reminds me that Harry Smith would be a good topic for the podcase – the old, weird America
        • Breaking the fourth wall, common and fiction and paranormal. Fundamental to storytelling, not a postmodern invention. "the story jumps its sprockets and moves into a new domain, our domain". Stories want to bleed into our world.
          • Princess Bride!