Brief updates
- 08:26 @tangowildheart Vilya was the elven Ring of Air, on the hand of Elrond in LotR. #
- 11:20 I can’t remember the zip code of the last place I worked, but I can give you the names of the three elven rings in no time. *eyeroll* #
- 12:40 @meiran Be strong. We may knock one down, but the Internet has a nigh-infinite-supply of idiots. #
- 18:13 Rumor going around that Daft Punk will score the “Tron 2” movie. tinyurl.com/b7ru6h Probably BS, but my nerd heart is soaring. #
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Ishtaria
According to Tolkien legend, the most skilled craftsman ever to live created the great Silmaril jewels using the radiance of the Two Trees which once lit the world. Almost immediately, of course, mortal and immortal began fighting for possession of them. In the epic wars that followed, two were lost, and the immortals placed the third in the sky: out of reach of the greedy, and a lasting beacon of hope to the good-hearted.
Wanna see it tonight? Go outside before the crescent Moon has set, and you’ll see an unusually bright Venus near the Moon and between it and the horizon. That’s the last legendary Silmaril.
(It’s also a stifling, baked world enveloped in poisonous acid fog, with no signs of life other than the corroding remmnants of a few robot landing probes from Earth. But that’s an entirely different realm of cool and interesting.)
M for Monday
raininva and I went to see V for Vendetta yesterday. Considering the amount of whining that I’d seen at various ‘Net sites, I was surprised to enjoy it a great deal. It never went all stupid on me, and it practically begged for thought and argument about its ‘message’, rather than blind acceptance.
I’m really looking forward to Technicon. It looks like I’ll be a very busy camper that weekend, but that’s okay – I won’t get bored 🙂
I’m working my way through my yearly LOTR re-read. I’ve got a lot of new books on the shelves waiting for me, but I needed the familiar lands of Middle-Earth for a while. I haven’t made it a page farther into “Wicked”, which tells you how gripping I’ve found it.
And I’m really done with 40-50 degree temperatures. It needs to get warm, and stay warm.
Movie thoughts etc.
Why couldn’t Watto take Republic credits? They’d have to be a pretty solid currency at that time. For that matter, why couldn’t Qui-Gon find someone who’d change his Republic credits over to Tatooine ones for a fixer’s fee? “Wretched hives” always have someone who can do this.
Message to the Wachowskis: I saw some of Revolutions the other day, and I’m sorry, but your movies make a lot more sense if Morpheus. Oracle, and Architect were supplying Neo with inaccurate / incomplete information, and Zion / the tunnels were simply another layer of the Matrix. This explains too much to be dismissed, no matter what you tried to sell us in movie three. Maybe what you told us “was true, from a certain point of view.”
I remain amazed at the Tolkien fans who feel that Peter Jackson did a poor job with LOTR. He pulled off a movie-making miracle, coherently filming a epic that the original author considered unfilmable, and in the process winning the hearts of both the general public and the Academy with a fantasy film. Sure, lots of us would have made a few different choices, but I don’t care to hear anyone say he’s a hack until they personally can produce something better.
Over the weekend, a friend made some excellent conjectures on who Harry Potter’s “Half-Blood Prince” might be. At least two of them could lead to very interesting storylines; the trick will be to not have it spoiled before I can read the actual book.
Rain got her PSP yesterday. I’ll say the first thing everyone else does – “Nice Screen!” She’s enjoying a couple of the games, too. With the default settings I found on the web, 30 minutes of video are ~200 MB more or less of a memory card, so at ~$100 for a 1 GB card, it’s clear we won’t be carrying around a fistful of pre-loaded feature-length movies.
I might head to the Rocky Horror Picture Show tonight. We’ll see.
Geekery, sappy and comedic
I was lucky enough to be near a broadband connection yesterday when SpaceShipOne went up again. The live feed from the small rear-mounted camera was breath-taking: no movie effects, no footage released by NASA months later; the viewers were all stowaways, participating in this ride.
No thunder, flames, pieces designed to fall off; yesterday some guy just got in a plane and went up to space for a bit, just like all the science fiction said would happen. It doesn’t hurt that his launch system looks like Hayao Miyazaki and Gerry Anderson went out drinking together one night.
You know why I like this setup – both launches have suffered control problems, and both times, it didn’t matter. It was a minor inconvenience, not even as major as a flat tire in a car. That’s the sort of ride I’d feel good about, over a system “guaranteed” to have no issues at all. Leonardo DeCaprio and Kate Winslet learned a truth about systems that “can’t fail”.
In unrelated news, mollyringwraith has posted “Lord of the Rings told in lines from Star Wars“. You should check it out.
GANDALF: Lord Saruman. I should have known. Only you could be so bold. The Wizard Senate will not sit for this, when they hear you’ve attacked a poor little–
SARUMAN: Don’t play games with me, Gandalf. You weren’t on any pipeweed mission this time. You passed directly through a magic-infested area. Several transmissions were beamed to this tower by palantir. I want to know what happened to the Ring you found.
GANDALF: I don’t know what you’re talking about. I’m a friendly old wizard on a diplomatic mission to Hobbiton…
SARUMAN: You’re part of the western Alliance, and a traitor. Take him away!
Hand’s not here.
I’d like to echo sentiments posted by snidegrrl a few months back: morning radio, shut up and play some damn music! I don’t mind headlines, I appreciate the weather, I can even deal with sports scores. But I don’t want to hear your views on welfare, library fines, or your cute little call-in battle of the sexes. Play some music! It’s your own fault that I’m not listening to your advertisers – I waited for 10 minutes, but finally gave up and switched over to my mp3 player which never makes me listen to anyone’s opinion.
On the other hand, it’s a cloudless, low-humidity 70 degrees this morning, so the start of the day isn’t all that bad. And I finally fixed the space bar on my work keyboard.
One can play the Lord of the Rings CCG online, buying virtual starter decks and boosters and playing 24/7 against people all over the globe. The tutorial is free, runs on OS X and Windows, and it looked like an easy way to learn the game, so I downloaded it. I’ve played 10 games, and been wiped out every time. Am I just not any good at collectible games? Does my brain just not have the correct logic paths? I know I’m a newbie playing against a computer, but still I thought I’d have won once. Or maybe even just barely lost. *sigh*
Entry-level Tolkien fans, save yourself some time! The Silmarillion in 1000 Words Surprisingly accurate, too.
Mixed Marriages CAN Work!
Just finished re-reading the third of the Lord of the Rings books, and looked up some dates in the Appendix… at the time of the first movie, Aragorn (Strider) is 85 years old! I want to look that good when I’m 85 – guess I’d better start working on it now 🙂
The elven princess Arwen, on the other hand, is a youthful 2800. Elrond is somewhere in the 8,000 – 12,000 year old range… when he starts on the “Back in MY day…” line, he means it…
