As many of you already know, Palantir is an AI surveillance company, and in the Legendarium (the term for every piece of LOTR lore, including Unfinished Tales, the Silmarillion and more) the Palantir are magical stones made by the Elves that both allow people who wield them to communicate with one another, mostly used to manipulate and decieve the viewer, but there's more companies that I didn't know existed until looking various terms up as a result.
Anduril (Flame of the West in Elvish/Sindarin) is the reforged sword given to Aragorn, made from the shards of Narsil (in the books, it's reforged before the Council of Elrond and Aragorn carries it with him the entire time, as book Aragorn has essentially already gone through his character arc and just wants to be king, while Jackson's Aragorn receives Anduril as a gift from Elrond during the Ride to Gondor, in order to show the Army of the Dead that he is Isildur's heir and gain their service. The Thiel company is a drone company.
The Valar are the first of the beings created by the Abrahamic God of the Legendarium, Eru Iluvatar, effectively demigods, and the Thiel company is a VC investment firm.
Mithril is a metal lighter than silk and stronger than steel mined by the dwarves, which most notably in the trilogy is given to Frodo before leaving the Council of Elrond and saves him from getting stabbed several times, and while this isn't the last company (it's another VC investment firm), it's just really weird seeing someone intentionally take these terms and pervert them for his own purposes, as if he's trying to supplant Tolkien and have those terms remembered for how he uses them.
I'm sure that some of you all may have forgotten that the US, Canada and Mexico are hosting the World Cup this year, but it starts on Monday and there's been plenty of bad news about it so far, such as:
FIFA trying to ban people from bringing water bottles into stadiums at the last minute in order to help Coca-Cola's profits by forcing people to buy Dasani water at the stadiums only just got backtracked a few days ago: Link and archive link (archive.today/archive.is is bugging out on this website, so using .org.) Keir Starmer comments about it.
Border Patrol blocked a Somali referee voted best ref in Africa from entering the country: Article and Archive link
FIFA/the US took the ticket allocation for Iran fans away, making it so no Iran fans not already in the US can attend games: Article and Archive Link
Border Patrol/Customs disallowing more Iranian staff: Article and Archive Link and Discussion
Random Scotland fans getting their ESTA statuses changed/revoked last minute: Article
There was a shooting near England's training camp, which while wouldn't truly be news, sparked gun control debate nonsense: Article, archive link and discussion
Random Morocco fans also denied entry: Article and archive link
This is just stuff from this week, and the 'funniest' part of it all is if the US and Iran both finish second in their groups, they'll play each other on July 3rd, the day before Independence Day and the 250th anniversary of this country.
I'm mostly intrigued on whether or not all the denials are legitimate or not, which we probably will never get to know the answer of.
The only reason I even remembered was because my mom has been watching it for the past few days and told me, but I'm not even interested in watching anything, not even the hockey or bobsled stuff. Dunno if it's just me or what, but it felt like the Summer Olympics overall are just more popular in general.
The specific streamer(s) don't really matter for the sake of this post, but I've been cooped up in the house for the past few weeks and wanted to go do something, so when I found out about it, I got the tickets.
I tend to mostly 'window shop' at that sort of parties, since I don't really fit my own standards at the moment, but when the doors opened, someone I ended up hanging out with for most of the party approached the two hosts and bought them drinks, and as the night went on, we ended up talking about how in general, shyness and not wanting to approach people, not just women, as a whole isn't any good, so I 'shot my shot' a few times, failed, but it didn't really matter to me since I wasn't expecting anything.
The actual party was rather, to use a term that I actually saw on here ages ago, 'Bohemian'. I haven't been to a club in years so I was wondering what sort of music they'd play and the majority of it was about sex and various sex acts, of course girls wearing clothes that show a bunch of skin off, etc, but one thing I didn't realize when just looking around is how obvious it actually is when a woman's had 'work' done.
I'm not really paying attention to that stuff on a regular basis, but I genuinely didn't realize how blatantly obvious it is until you actually look at someone who has and damn.
Ended up getting pictures with both hosts, but one thing that I learned today that I had already assumed but had it confirmed from asking a different question entirely is that one of the streamers has a boyfriend, said BF was there, and that actually gave me confidence since that dude is my height, just jacked, and neither of us are anywhere near six feet tall. I overall just had a good time getting out of the house and partying for once, but just hearing and seeing certain things is incredibly eye opening.
Hope everyone here had a great New Years' Eve, and hopefully 2026 is a good year for all. (Midterms and the 250th birthday of the US)