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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   1279 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for February 21, 2025

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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I was given LotR (in a Russian translation) around age 5 or so, and seemingly read the whole thing, though it's hard to say how much of it I understood or whether I skipped around, especially since the movies and finally rereading it in English could have implanted any number of false memories. I did remember the maps, the copperplate etchings of barrels that the particular print version used as chapter separators, and being mildly irritated when the movies came out much later because I seemed to have had formed a very particular mental image of one segment (the rocky area that Frodo and Sam traversed before the swamp with the dead elves) and it looked different in the film, so it was probably not zero (and whatever I was doing with it, I am told that I was so absorbed that my parents got to enjoy many months of relative peace).

(We also had a comic book version of the Hobbit, which I probably was given earlier, but couldn't get into because I found the pictures confusing. I still struggle with comics/manga visual storytelling now.)

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