The second-to-last episode of The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power confronts the aftermath of the Mount Doom eruption and takes us even deeper into the emotions of Durin, the tender-hearted Dwarf. If you need to catch up on last week’s episode, you can find it here.

Otherwise, spoilers lie ahead. You’ve been warned.

Let’s dig in! (But not too deep. There are… bad things down there.)

More like Khazad DOOM, amma right?

KHAZAD-DÛM — When we last left off, Elrond had gone to Durin with a bonkers story about how the Elves need exposure to mithril in order not to die (I know, I don’t love the backstory either) and Durin agreed to talk to his father, the king. Welp, in episode 7, negotiations don’t go well. Despite Elrond promising everything short of his silver sideburn clippers, King Durin still feels mining for mithril is too dangerous, even if it means all the Elves are going to shrivel up or whatever.

TOUGH NOOGIES, ELVES.

Back at home, Prince Durin is distracted about the decision. Disa is pissed too and actively takes it out on a small ax she’s blacksmithing. Forget meditation. I want a blacksmithing forge for the sole purpose of stress relief. Then Elrond turns up looking like he just stumbled onto a particularly nasty subreddit about the show. They exchange one of those looks that just says it all and Durin starts crying. Mercy, these two must have a special bond if there aren’t

With the holiday season rolling in, you may have thoughts of chunky sweaters, warm drinks and traveling to visit friends and family. Here are several gadgets that can make your trip much more comfortable, whether you’re traveling to distant locations or taking a well-deserved staycation. On Amazon, I’ve discovered some of the best travel-related finds for all budgets. All of these products have been examined and tested by me to ensure that they’re worthy of your money.

You gotta take some photos when you’re traveling. Comes with a super wide angle and macro lens that screw into the same holder. It’s ideal for single lens phones if you’re not ready to spend big bucks to upgrade just for more cameras. You can use it with Apple or Android phones with more than one camera, you just need to position it over the main wide camera.

And it comes with a clip-on LED light, lanyard and polishing cloth? Magic! I can’t believe this is only $40.

You’re receiving price alerts for Xenvo pro lens kit

What’s a vacation without music? This is a teensy tiny 6.2-ounce Bluetooth speaker that you absolutely need to find space for in your carry on because it’s small enough to fit in the palm of your hand. It’s only $18 and the sound is pretty impressive with rounded bass. Bonus points: It gets loud enough to fill a small room with music.

But it doesn’t stop there! It also acts as a remote shutter for your

black holes are awesome and powerful and can seem a bit scary thanks to their reputation for gravitational pulls so strong not even light can escape. So let’s give a big welcome to Gaia BH1, the new closest black hole to Earth.

Gaia BH1 is dormant, 10 times more massive than our sun and located about 1,600 light-years away in the constellation Ophiuchus (the serpent-bearer). The team behind the discovery says it’s three times closer to Earth than the previous winner, a black hole located in the Monoceros (unicorn) constellation. Gaia BH1 is close enough that the National Science Foundation’s NOIRLab astronomy center considers it to be “in our cosmic backyard.”

“While there have been many claimed detections of systems like this, almost all these discoveries have subsequently been refuted,” said astrophysicist Kareem El Badry in a NOIRLab statement Friday. “This is the first unambiguous detection of a sun-like star in a wide orbit around a stellar-mass black hole in our galaxy.” Stellar-mass black holes are within five to 100 times the mass of our sun, as compared with supermassive black holes that live in the centers of galaxies.

El-Badry is the lead author of a paper on the black hole published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society journal this week. The lengthy co-author list points to how complex and challenging the study was. Finding this black hole was a science triumph with many layers.

The story starts with the European Space Agency’s Gaia space observatory, which