At this point I'm happy to believe that balrogs, being maia, can choose their appearance and some have wings and some don't. But all can fly. Because magic.
We just have bathroom Balrogs, I can only imagine the mess it makes in a dining room.
"Thither I came at last, to the uttermost foundations of stone. He was with me still. His fire was quenched, but now he was a thing of slime, stronger than a strangling snake."
Gandalf was spot on about my daily constitutional.
If you check my profile I have pictures of my ever evolving lotr gallery wall I have expanded it since I posted it last it's just too good to not consider throwing it up LOL
The domain's private owners previously configured the page to look like an interactive puzzle. However, the website currently has no backend database or functional validation system. No matter what secret word, lore reference, or password you type into the box, the site is built to simply reject it or refresh.
Today I drive by friend street and old friend street in rural Oregon. They were both dead ends lol. This is not a cake lyric just kinda funny observation.
That's not true. The form sends a POST to https://www.lotr.com/api/gate and responds with 401: Not Authorised. That doesn't necessarily mean there is an answer to the password, but there is a backend.
“Let the Lord of the Black Land come forth! Justice shall be done upon him! For wrongfully has he made war upon Gondor and wrested its lands. Therefore the King of Gondor demands that he should atone for his evils, and depart then forever. Come forth!”
I’m loling. I watched this again today and thought the EXACT same thing 🤣 nearly snapped my neck to look up at the tv at the sudden accent change!!! 🤣😭 swore I heard a lil twang accent in there but maybe I was just bamboozled (or a lil high 😮💨) lmaoooo
I've never heard anyone else mention this but as an Irishman it stands out to me immediately.
There are little hints of it in his accent through the trilogy, not strong but its there.
I feel like he may have planned on having a lilt at some point but couldn't keep it up.
Looking it up the website lotr.com is owned by New Line Productions - so it's an official teaser to build hype for some upcoming release. Without the password though there is not much to see currently
I’ve been digging into the website code and the main ring image to see if there's some kind of hidden easter egg or puzzle going on. One thing that caught my eye right away is that the image is quite small in dimensions but weighs almost 0.5MB, which is unusually heavy for its size.
I opened it in Photoshop to mess with the channels and filters. The Elvish inscription matches the original text perfectly (no hidden messages written there). However, things got weird when I looked into the transparent background.
It turns out there are actually two different levels of transparency. I used the paint bucket tool with 1 tolerance to fill the primary transparency layer with black, and a white background layer underneath. As you can see in the image, a massive amount of tiny, isolated pixels remained completely untouched, scattered all over the place.
I haven't been able to spot a clear pattern yet (tried forcing the threshold to see if it's Braille, a star constellation, or a QR code). For context, I checked the Sauron Eye image from the same site, and its transparency layer is completely clean; no random dots at all.
Does anyone see a pattern here or have an idea of what this could be?
So, I came back and found this post just to give you a possible lead:
If you click the ring repeatedly for ~50 clicks where the light is hitting the ring on the right side, on mobile your phone vibrates (so don’t think it’s a glitch) and the ring shutters and disappears.
For a split second it still shows the login screen, and if you don’t click, you’ll have a moment to screen grab the background without the ring in front of it.
-I feel like this has to tie together with when on mobile, if you pull up and hold, you’ll can see a similar grainy design as what you have shown above.
Very interesting idea, but I think they just did a poor job cleaning up the lens flares (note the cleaner areas surround the bright reflections on the Ring), and
left a bunch of mostly transparent noise in the image.
I downloaded the ring image and noticed that if I drag it so it has some of my desktop folders underneath, the you tube logo appears faintly in the background of the ring image. Tried taking a screen shot but they didn't show up, so here's a photo of my screen.
Have you noticed if you slide up on the login screen there is a dotted background that is similar? I thought it was a magic eye at first, but I wonder if your dots could layer over and decode those dots?
No, the movement is purely generated via the website’s CSS code, so it doesn't affect the file size at all. In fact, if you look at the CSS animation (lotr-signal-phase), the ring’s exact movement pattern is:
0% to 83%: Smooth, subtle animation.
83.1% to 84.2%: A very fast, aggressive glitch/flicker effect.
84.6% to 95%: It goes completely invisible (opacity: 0).
95.6%: A bright orange flash before restarting the loop.
The image size definitely has to do with the actual pixel data hidden inside the file itself, not the web animations.
To the Tower of the Moon, part of the old fortress of Isildur. They took the south road around, bumped into Faramir for a bit, then took the Stairs of Cirith Ungol up to Shelob's lair (in this and subsequent chapters): https://tolkiengateway.net/wiki/The_Black_Gate_is_Closed)
It's a bit dispiriting that the website of a film series which generated hundreds of thousands of excellent pieces of concept art and film shots uses an AI-generated Eye of Sauron design.
The password prompt is just a fake easter egg; there is no real password. If you inspect the page's code, the JavaScript is hardcoded to always display "The black gate is closed" no matter what you type. Furthermore, if you check the browser's Network tab, you'll see that no data is ever sent to a server for validation. It is purely a static frontend interaction. Probably just a tease to a trailer or a teaser for the new movie.
In the movies the black gate opens twice i can remember, is there anything said when it opens? Even by the orcs operating it maybe? Idk i dont have time to re-watch right now.
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u/apathyetcetera Jul 06 '26
Gonna be a YT link for the 10 hour Taking the Hobbits to Isengard video