Happy New Year, everyone! We saw lots of concerts tonight and just watched the fireworks to welcome in the new year!
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Happy new year! I was stupid enough to decide to drive to MCDonalds at exactly 24.00 through streets of people armed with fireworks...urban warfare 2.0!
Pirates by the Sea done - 10 hours of gaming by the seaside, a 27c day of perfect sunshine and a BBQ (snags on the barbie mate) by Sydney Harbour.
View from the table - harbour bridge etc excellent location, will certainly be doing it again. Was also good building all the ships and using them on a big blue tablecloth serving as an ocean.
Use heavy minis though, the odd sea breeze can send your minis sailing!
If you have never watched the "Ace of Bass: Sign" video, please do so right this second.
Pirates by the Sea done - 10 hours of gaming by the seaside, a 27c day of perfect sunshine and a BBQ (snags on the barbie mate) by Sydney Harbour.
Bastard.
It's freeze-your-effing-face-off cold in New England today (seriously--like -15 F wind chill)
Pirates by the Sea done - 10 hours of gaming by the seaside, a 27c day of perfect sunshine and a BBQ (snags on the barbie mate) by Sydney Harbour.
Bastard.
It's freeze-your-effing-face-off cold in New England today (seriously--like -15 F wind chill)
Bah, it is not that cold, only -2F on the thermometer here. Weather.com claims -7F, but their thermometer is probably in the valley somewhere. Very little wind though, so no real effective wind chill (which is really a bs number made up by people too stupid to wear good clothing and cover their faces.)
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We had reports here about "Super-Ice-Cold-Mega-Winter" in the New England States.
If you have never watched the "Ace of Bass: Sign" video, please do so right this second.
Anything in particular? ;p
about 20C (68F) in the AZ. No water in sight though...
10C here...in January...ridiulous, should be like -10C
8F here right now, suppose to be down to -4F tonight.
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Wow, all sounds horribly cold - Reign of Winter in real life! :p
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As long as it doesn't last for 5 years, I'll be fine.
Haha,or get transported to the Russian Revolution!
We had a nice dumping of snow over the weekend, but last night the freezing rain came. School was cancelled today!
Long range forecast says I am away from Valentines (Feb 14) for two weeks.
Scarce opportunity for internetz!
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I want schoo cancelled too! Where to apply?
Internetz? Sounds like a word from the Great Dictator or a Kraftwerk record...
We got about a foot of snow here over the weekend, and today a nice 1/2 centimeter of ice. School is opening 2 hours late.
Thanks for the head up, Shifty. My real long range forecast says that I am away for four weeks in July. The family and I are going to hike the Southern Upland Way from the west coast to the east coast of Scotland. It will be a great trip, but I anticipate no internet.
Wow, all sounds horribly cold - Reign of Winter in real life! :p
Hah! I have a magus playing that in PbP...
Really we only have like 8-9 months of winter reigning here in New Hampshire. The we get a month of mud season followed by 2-3 months of hard sledding, and then back into winter.
For instance, here is the monthly weather for December for Mount Washington in the northern part of the state. Only 14 days below zero, and only 4 with the high temperatures below zero. It was a calm month to with the average wind speed a mere 46 mph (about 75kph for you metric people).
if I'm not mistaken, mt. Washington has both the most dramatic temperature change (biggest change over shortest time), AND highest recorded windspeed, ever on earth.
Edit: people dying in Tuckerman's Ravine is not at all uncommon
They do not all die in Tuckerman's Ravine. Although my father has many stories of pulling people out of there with multiple compound fractures, and more than a few times having to go on search and rescue to find people who thought it would be fun to get buried in an avalanche.
The highest windspeed of 231mph in 1934 on Mount Washington is no longer the highest, a Cyclone in northern Australia a few years ago was clocked at 253.
Not sure about the dramatic temp change, but I think that is actually in a place called Spearfish, South Dakota.
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Finally saw the latest Hobbit, quite like the Orcs :)
Finally saw the latest Hobbit, quite like the Orcs :)
dying to see it. A friend of mine who digs Jackson's movies didn't like it. Haven't gotten details as to why though...
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I saw it and loved it! Smaug was awesome! Peter Jackson definitely took some liberties that a Tolkien purist would hate! Things like including Legolas as one of the Elves of Mirkwood and giving him a love interest, but overall, I didn't mind the additions. I can't wait for the third part to come out!
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Legolas actually was one of the elves of Mirkwood - just went un-named in the Hobbit book.
Purists disagree with:
Unmasked man love of elves
Making it so that the dwarves were reliant on the elves - ie. if not for the elves then they would have died multiple times
Turning the guile and trickery of the book into action sequences
Devaluing the role of Bilbo
Athelas scene that didn't fit
Love triangle based on not much
But Smaug was very well done.
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I've seen it about a dozen times now (Yay perks of working at a movie theater) and I really do enjoy the movie. I understand some of the liberties and changes they made... but I'm not going to pick apart a movie where I get to see the red dragon! I have a few frames of Smaug, hoping to get a few of Thandrial when we tear it down.
DragonBlood, I agree with you for the most part, on liberties taken. Example: I loved Harry Potter 3. Even with the liberties taken, I felt that they did not take away from the essence of the story.
on the other hand, I HATED Harry Potter 4. IMHO they wrecked Dumbledore (turned him into a panicky old man who was barely in control of anything) AND Harry (by skipping out on his throwing off Voldemort's Imperius curse in their duel, they missed an opportnity to show Harry had heart/skill/will rather than just luck), to the detrement of the story.
Abercrombie's review is fairly close to mine
In the end what I loved about Jackson’s adaptations of the Lord of the Rings was that, in spite of what he cut and what he added, in spite of the small liberties and the amped-up action, he somehow achieved the alchemical balancing act of making the films feel like The Lord of the Rings. What I don’t like about Jackson’s adaptations of the Hobbit is that they just don’t feel like The Hobbit.
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As an Orc purist though, I quite liked both sets (Hobbit vs LOTR) but I found this lot didn't have the same realistic gritty feel, they were a bit too cgi-clean instead of latex and nasty.
Other than that, I can see where purists might get upset, but frankly they can go ride their thumb. Some stuff in there I thought was a bit silly sauce, like the aforementioned Love triangle which fit about as well as the love story theme did in that WW2 classic 'The Battle of Britain' - bolted on and strange - but at least its not a big part.
Go go awesome Orcs, go go Dragons.
Abercrombie's review is fairly close to mine
In the end what I loved about Jackson’s adaptations of the Lord of the Rings was that, in spite of what he cut and what he added, in spite of the small liberties and the amped-up action, he somehow achieved the alchemical balancing act of making the films feel like The Lord of the Rings. What I don’t like about Jackson’s adaptations of the Hobbit is that they just don’t feel like The Hobbit.
I'm probably going to get gang-raped for this but...is that a bad thing?? honestly, I tried reading the Hobbit to my boy...and it had its slow parts...
YMMV definitely - I have fond memories of my father reading the Hobbit to me as a bedtime story.
The key of the changes that Jackson made is that it's really not an adaptation of the book anymore. He went out and made Lord of the Rings - the trilogy prequel... not The Hobbit.
I enjoyed the first movie alot more than this one - as the changes made didn't diverge too much from the book.
The trolls were changed up to make the dwarves more competent and have a bit of a fight - no problem, it still had the essence of Bilbo delaying and such.
Gollum's sequence was very faithful to the book - and was a standout because of it.
The chasing warg packs and resurrection of Azog (who was dead in the books) were a bit annoying... but still didn't distract too much.
Hell I even liked Radagast's rabbit sled.
But in the Desolation of Smaug, Jackson's systematically excised much of the guile, trickery and adventure in favor of long action sequences and the prevalence of the orc chasers (which again were not in the book). He also massively bloated the role that the elves play - when the posters at the cinemas in KL advertising the film show Legolas and Tauriel... then the focus is clearly firmly off the dwarves and hobbit innit?
Don't get me wrong - as a base level popcorn fantasy flick it was perfectly fine. Action was reasonably well directed, Weta Workshop remain stellar in recreating the feel of Middle Earth.
But the romantic in me was hoping for a movie that actually reminded me of the Hobbit book itself, which isn't what it does.
They needed to big up Tauriel and Legolas though for the female audience, because the one thing chicks dig as much as Legolas is other girls with bows.
Anyhow, good movie all in all.
There were two things that I really did not like:
1) It seemed that there was a ton of concern about the stream that would make one fall asleep (as I recall Bombur fell in and took a long snooze in the book) - this was completely missing in the movie.
2) As I recall, the dwarves and Bilbo spotted lights in the woods and chased them, only to have them all disappear. This happened several times before the elves finally caught them and blamed them for attacking. This could have been brilliantly played out in the movie, instead they just made the dwarves hopeless so that the elves had to rescue them from the spiders.
-- Or maybe I just do not recall the book, it has been about 2 years since I read it to my son.
ARRGH....spoilers!!....LALALALALALALALALA <fingers in ears...or in this case in eyes >
LOL
Rule of Female is probably why they kept Richard Armitage (Thorin) with a relatively short beard as well.
Tirion - you remember right... and it's strange to say for such a long movie, but they really raced through those bits of Mirkwood. They had the three minute acid trip sequence and then the spider attack and that was it.
I'm with Mark- Smaug was a good action flick, and noticeably better than the first, but I'm sad to say PJ was the wrong man to do the Hobbit. I thought Jackson hit LotR out of the ballpark, but he's totally tone deaf with the Hobbit. I don't really think film has to slave to its text source- sometimes the movie is better- (Bladerunner, The Shining)-but PJ's gone all Bruckheimer on a simple fairytale-like bedtime story.
violence over wit, video game action sequences, bloat beyond belief.
The only parts I liked from the first part was Gollum and probably I'm one of the few, the dwarves hanging around the hobbit hole. Shenanigans and song were more what the Hobbit was about.
Smaug was better- I did appreciate the added bits about Lake-town and Bard though they were far afield from the book. I could have skipped the flume ride and forge battles. Not a bad action flick, but not the Hobbit in my opinion.
At least he didn't go Michael Bay :p
In the end, it was a very good movie. A little long perhaps, but a fun to watch and well made film. While it has the outline of the Hobbit, it fails to follow the book. The Orcs, minimizing the length of time in the Mirkwood, changing the elves, changing the town. It just does not feel honest to the book. Nonetheless, as I said, I think that is a very good movie, just not a great representation of the full experience that is the Hobbit.
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At least he didn't go Michael Bay :p
Now that would just be cruel. ; )
I just do not recall a Battle of the Barrels from the book.
And the space laser. Do not forget the required Bay-ZER!
sorry for absence family member died sunday will try to get back to it after the weekend.
Condolences Tark.
In other news - Aaaaah! I've been Facebook stalked... and when I went to such great lengths to protect my identity... like using my actual name as my forum avatar :P
In other other news - I now know what Zyren looks like... so if I'm ever somehow in Germany and see him strutting down the street I can casually say hi.