sigh I’ll just put this here instead of writing it all over again: https://piefed.social/comment/10585049

You are correct regarding the implication, but I think it’s a bit different than that. The blade Merry uses to stab the witch king was from the barrow downs, and was enchanted to be able to harm the witch king. So it was less “oh duh she’s not a man, problem solved” and more “his magic shield is busted, stab him quick!”

The witch king was absolutely not unkillable, just hard to kill. Eowyn slew him after Merry stabbed him in the leg with a barrow blade. There is no indication that, had Frodo and Sam failed, the witch king would have risen again.

Pretty unrelated, but I do wonder what the mathematics are behind the elves taking the “straight road” from Middle Earth to Aman. I think it would start to ruin the mystique and magic of the Tolkien Legendarium, but it’s still fun to think about.

The idea is that after Sauron convinced Ar-Pharazôn, the last king of Númenor, to attack the Valar, Ilúvatar drowned their ships, killed their soldiers, and then reshaped Arda to be a sphere rather than flat. The elves who remained Middle Earth still had the right to return to Aman once they became weary of the world, and so Cirdan would build ships able to sail the old straight road directly from the grey havens to Aman. I’m wondering what that mechanism would be that would allow the ships to go through “space” rather than simply wrap around the sphere of Arda. Maybe a portal? Or just like straight up they lift off the ocean and float through space with minimal thrust before reaching Aman? Given that the Arda is supposed to be Earth far far in the past, how would the Valar hide themselves from a space travel capable humanity?

I have a similar use case with my PC and TV. My PC is across the house from the TV and is connected via an HDMI over Ethernet KVM for when I want to use my PC as a gaming console.

What I ended up doing was creating an automation in Home Assistant to turn on my KVM via a smart plug, then wake-on-lan my PC, and intiate a Steam Big Picture mode gamescope session. This was pretty tedious to get working all together, and startup time is pretty abysmal (around 1 minute to get fully into Steam), but it does actually work consistently.

In case anyone is interested in replicating my setup: I’m running NixOS 25.11 with the Jovian flake installed, and launching my session via the systemd service run_gamescope. If you’re not on NixOS, you should still be able to build your own solution by emulating the Steam Deck startup services (honestly, it’s not that complicated), or looking into projects like ChimeraOS.

One clarification: Sauron also commanded legions of Uruk-hai. It’s undoubtedly true that Saruman did breed his Isengarder Uruks himself, but it’s unclear whether or not these Isengarder Uruk’s were the first man/orc hybrids, and furthermore it is unknown who developed the crossbreeding idea.

Uruk-hai is simply the black speech word, and Uruks is the English translation, so the existence (or lack thereof) of the -hai suffix is no indicator of origin for any individual Uruk, therefore I will omit it as I continue.

Uruks were first documented as the elite force of Sauron present in the siege and sacking of Osgiliath and Ithilien, which predates Saruman’s use of them by approximately 1000 years. The strongest and stoutest orcs in the Mines of Moria are called Uruks, as are the orcs scene marching from Cirith Ungol as Sam and Frodo enter Mordor.

In true Tolkien fashion, it’s left unclear whether or not the Uruks are man/orc hybrids or just very strong orcs. Treebeard speculates that they’re hybrids (due to half the reasons present in the meme), but there’s no definite answer. I’d like to believe that they are hybrids of some kind since it furthers the themes established earlier in the chronology of evil corrupting creation in new ways, but the grain of salt must still be acknowledged.

I’m of the opinion that Sauron, or possibly Morgoth (who famously had a knack for biology), developed the Uruks as an elite breed of soldiers. He then taught Saruman how to breed the Uruks to sow discord further west. The additional magics and technology is all Saruman though, since Sauron typically leaned on raw power after his fair form was destroyed.

TL;DR: Saruman ain’t original, he just copied Sauron’s homework

One correction: Morgoth didn’t “create” any Balrogs. He merely corrupted Maia to his will

If your kids are only going to be using big picture mode in steam, then one system account will work. The steam deck only has one system user with the ability to have multiple steam accounts and that works great for multiple users, from my experience.

For anyone interested in a great dual use system for regular desktop use and a console-like experience, I recommend checking out nixos and jovian-nix:
https://jovian-experiments.github.io/Jovian-NixOS/

I’m using it on my main PC and it works incredibly well to mimic the steam deck experience using a full desktop on nixos 25.11

It looks like the QT 6 version isn’t available in nixpkgs yet, but the QT 5 version is. You’d need to explicitly install plasma 5 though, since nixos uses plasma 6 by default.

Plus, Andy Serkis narrates one version!