Recent content by ART!

Heck, even just 50 years ago - or less. I'm reading Factfulness right now, by Hans Rosling, and it's about misconceptions we have about how bad things are.

My view is that Tolkien was a truly great writer, but a bad novelist - which is fine, because he had no interest in writing a novel; in a lot of ways, he wanted to write what you're describing.

If only the young, misunderstood Balrogs knew that the nerdy Mithril Science teacher gets them - she was them, in her Maiar youth. More's the pity. I think Rings of Power did an...okay? job with Tom. I wasn't annoyed by how he was used, written, or played - but I wasn't in love with it, either...

Aside from the value, return on the dollar, etc., short of some truly global collapse/catastrophe, humans are not going to stop exploring space. Exploring is just one of the things we do.

I made the mistake of running a thri-kreen fighter weapon master (using 5.5E's weapon masteries/properties) with the two-weapon fighting style. I mean, I learned a lot - mostly that I will never do that again. Too complicated - I had to make a combat flow-chart for that guy. That said, he...

We watched the first episode of the recent tv series adaptation of The Count of Monte Cristo, on PBS. It has a good lead actor, and the production looks very good, but the rest is very by-the-numbers. It feels choppy in places, and does this annoying thing of - multiple times - showing us...

I just took a look at the public domain image sites I could think of, and they're primarily historical stuff, not modern - assuming by "modern" you mean "current". Take a look at art sites like ArtStation or DeviantArt.

I feel like a truck that says "there's antimatter in this truck" is just asking for trouble! :LOL:

I almost feel bad comparing The Hobbit films to the LOTR films, because the latter is such a high bar. The Eye of the Duck podcast did a series on epic fantasy films, in which they covered the LOTR movies in depth, and then looked at The Hobbit movies. They take a pretty dim view of the...

I think they're casting someone as younger Aragorn, and we'll see Viggo as post-ROTK Aragorn/Elessar? I haven't been paying super-close attention to the rumors and info on the HfG movie.

If the flashbacks are to events that happened during the LOTR movie but were not shown in them, then yes, Frodo could be in those flashbacks, in which case they would need modem, older Elijah Wood. Given the info we have, that is a possibility. If that does happen, let's just hope we're...

It sounds like Frodo will not be a character in this film, and that the other three will be some amount of older than they were at the end of ROTK

[attempt to insert Colbert "GIVE IT TO ME NOW" gif fails]

I saw this story covered over at Dark Horizons, and it says this film will be "...set fourteen years after the passing of Frodo. The hobbits Sam, Merry, and Pippin set out to retrace the first steps of their adventure. Meanwhile, Sam’s daughter, Elanor, has discovered a long-buried secret and...

This dovetails with what I posted about monsters - if theyre just going to port standard 5.5E monsters into a new setting, for me that really reduces my interest level.