The Lord of the Rings, Revisited

Posted on by Scott / 0 Comment

Earlier this month after accompanying me to see The Hobbit on New Years Day, a little out of the blue my wife surprised me by remarking on the ride home that she was interested in giving the Lord of the Rings trilogy another shot. I guess she had tried watching them years ago but things just never clicked and she ended up getting bored with them, and ever since I’ve always gotten a lot of grief whenever my beloved trilogy comes on TV … until now!

Plus, wouldn’t you know … I think she actually ended up liking ’em this time around?! 😉

Or at least parts of ’em, anyways… 😛

So we’ve been watching one movie a weekend for pretty much the last three weeks – I would’ve loved to just sit down and run a crazy marathon to go through them all in a single weekend, but I didn’t want to push my luck! Even without watching the Extended Editions (I actually prefer the theatrical versions anyways), we were putting in something like 3.5-4 hours of couch time once you factored in a little extra for snacks and a break. The week between Fellowship & Two Towers wasn’t too bad, but I was really itching to dig into Return of the King after The Two Towers ended … probably because those are the two I tend to watch the most anyways.

For what it’s worth, though, I really enjoyed watching the entire trilogy this time around not only for getting to turn my wife on to one of the greatest stories ever told (in my not-so-humble opinion!), but it also gave me a chance to appreciate more of the nuances for myself. Like I said, I usually don’t lose much sleep if I only catch 2 & 3 around Thanksgiving when they’re on TV constantly, but I was reminded that there are still some great moments in the first installment – when we first get to meet Frodo and Bilbo and the other hobbits, or when Aragorn makes his introduction as Strider, or when Arwen outruns the Nazgul and turns the river against them trying to save Frodo after he’s been stabbed.

And of course…

I think The Two Towers is where my wife’s interest really started to pick up, though … at least that’s when she noted that Legolas never runs out of arrows, no matter how many he shoots! I suggested that maybe they were magical blah blah blah, but she wasn’t buying it … as if the wraiths flying around on dragons and the giant flaming eyeball were perfectly reasonable, but the arrows were just going too far! 😉

The Battle of Helm’s Deep, of course, is always the highlight of that one – as much as I enjoy the Ents on their own, I feel like their super slow talking is just holding me up from watching Gimli and Legolas fight over kills at the battle! But some of the scenes leading up to the big battle itself, too, are pretty great – I really love how Fellowship ends with the three committing to hunting down Merry & Pippin’s captors, so it’s noble to watch how that story arc progresses in the second movie. Eomer is always a curious one, too – so easily exiled from his Uncle’s kingdom, and yet he follows Gandalf back to pretty much save the day at Helm’s Deep all the same … what a guy!

Another scene that had slipped my mind from this one was Sam’s little speech of encouragement to Frodo during the Nazgul raid after they’ve been captured by Faramir…

And of course, what’s there even to say that hasn’t already been said about Return of the King?! The lighting of the Beacons of Gondor, Arwen’s plea to her father to reforge the blade that was broken, Elrond presenting the newly forged Anduril to Aragorn and directing him to the Dimolt road to recruit the Army of the Dead, the Battle of the Pellenor Fields, “I can’t carry it, but I can carry you!”, even the eight different endings that seem both excessive and also incredibly endearing at the same time because really, the trials that these characters endure over the course of 9 months are the kinds of things that change people … you can see it in Frodo’s eyes as he walks through Bag End and I think he even says it at one point – “there is no going back – there are some things that time cannot mend.”

Very bittersweet – like, “Yay, we saved the world!!! Ummm, now what?”

In a way I kind of feel like I fall in love with these movies all over again every time that I watch them, and this post ought to be proof enough that this time was certainly no exception! The end of Return of the King really left me wanting more last night, and as much as I just don’t have the time to go re-watch The Hobbit this weekend, I really think that I want to try and read through the books again this year leading up to the next installment of The Hobbit in December. I couldn’t even begin to guess how long it’s been since I’ve read the books – at least a decade, but probably a lot longer than that. In fact, earlier this month I picked up a neat little book kind of about the philosophy of The Shire and relating hobbit life to real life that’s been kind of a fun read … I don’t read many books these days, so I guess I’ve got to build up to it!

But maybe when I’m done in a few weeks, I’ll grab a copy of The Fellowship of the Ring and see where the written version takes me. I know that it’s out of order, but I’m thinking that if I read the trilogy first, I should be on The Hobbit this fall right around the time the new movie is coming out, so I can read the book, then watch LOTR on TV around Thanksgiving, then watch the first installment of The Hobbit on DVD, and then go see The Desolation of Smaug in the theater come December 13th!!! :mrgreen:

So many hobbits, so much to enjoy, and to be, and to do…

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XPI5EgqQoy0

😉

Dream Journal : …

Posted on by Scott / 0 Comment

Have you ever had a dream that left you visibly shaken when you finally woke up?

A lot of the details of this one are already starting to fade, but I remember having lengthy fights with two different girls – not sure if it was romantically inclined or otherwise, but it was clearly pretty bad because at one point I left and came back, and then they were both laughing at me … I’m still not entirely sure why, but I remember in the dream that it made me very depressed.

Next I went to visit my Mom, and it was almost as if I were saying goodbye – somehow she knew everything and understood, and our exchange was surprisingly calm despite her somehow knowing what was going to happen next. Before I left I told her that I loved her, and she replied that I’d always live on in her heart.

The last thing I saw was the mental image of a handgun, and then I suddenly woke up.

…and just for the record, please don’t take this post as a cry for help or anything – I just think it’s interesting to talk about, even if the subject of something like suicide is pretty damn scary.

What I found weird about this whole dream was that even after I woke up and got in the shower, it took me a good twenty minutes to sort of calm down and remind myself that it was in fact, just a dream, and that I’d gone to sleep feeling good and that I needed to get back there because I’ve got a lot of creative work to get done today. I’ve never in real life actually considered suicide as a solution to my problems and besides, I’m far too afraid of death to ever actually go through with it. It always seemed like such a passive aggressive way of dealing with “the people who’ve wronged you,” as if whoever you’re at odds with is going to forever mourn your loss and spend the rest of their own lives wishing that they’d treated you differently.

And maybe that’s true in some cases, but assuming that my own dream maybe was about love, it’s probably a hard fetch to believe that those girls wouldn’t eventually move on and find happiness with someone else later on down the road.

The whole experience actually reminded me of a very different dream that I distinctly recall having a couple of years ago. It was during a time when Sara was both working and going through nursing school, so we didn’t really see each other a whole lot, and apparently in this dream for whatever reason I had gone back in time to before the two of us had actually met. Again, I don’t recall the actual reason – maybe it was to try a different path with another girl or something, but eventually I found myself in the same place as before – alone, and wanting to speed things up until I would actually meet my wife.

Except it didn’t happen that time around.

In real life we met on the Internet, so I bode my time until the spring of 2006 and then signed up for chemistry.com the same as before, but that fateful profile about the girl who loved dolphins never came across my screen. Something was different this time, and I waited and waited, but nothing ever happened until I eventually decided to try and hunt her down myself because I still remembered everything from our future life together – where she worked, etc…, and so I showed up one day at the school where she was teaching, but she didn’t recognize me.

And she got kinda freaked out because I sounded like a stalker, knowing all of these intimate details about her while she’d never seen me before in her life!

I woke up from that dream as well pretty shook up, and I found myself wanting to talk to her right away (she was working nights, so she wasn’t home) just to make sure that she still knew who I was! Admittedly I don’t know a lot about dreams – where they come from, and how your brain draws on past and fictional experiences … it’s not like I’d watched Back to the Future before going to bed or anything, so who knows where the concept actually came from in the first place.

I really don’t have a good way to end this post, so I’m just going to stop now and go work on some other stuff. I do feel a lot better now that a couple of hours have passed and I’ve aired some of it here as well. Besides, it’s not like we can really do anything about the dreams that we have anyways … when I was a kid, I used to imagine that I could and I would press different “imaginary buttons” on the side of my bed if I wanted to dream about Mega Man or Super Mario Bros. that particular night, but as far as I can recall, the buttons never actually worked.

And even if they did, I’m pretty certain that as an adult I wouldn’t exactly have buttons for breakup suicide or time travel relationship disaster, anyways! They’d likely be much more perverted buttons, which I’m not going to go into any further detail about here…  8)

Walt Disney World, circa 1972

Posted on by Scott / 0 Comment

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NCKgyXBohLk

Talk about a trip back to the past! 8 years before I was born, but also 10 years before even a second park was completed for the esteemed resort destination. Just the Magic Kingdom, Contemporary Resort, and Polynesian Village – kinda crazy to look back and see everything that’s grown out of that area in the last 40 years!!!

And thank god the restaurant in Tomorrowland eventually gave way to Cosmic Ray’s Starlight Cafe – I can’t imagine a lunch in Tomorrowland not featuring the sounds of Sunny Eclipse and the Space Angels… 😀

Final Fantasy … a mobile verdict

Posted on by Scott / 0 Comment

So after my little review of the Nintendo DS version of my all-time favorite video game last week, I actually discovered an iPhone version of pretty much the exact same game. I spent some time playing around with it this weekend and as excited as I am to see a considerable catalog of Final Fantasy games now being ported to iOS, ultimately I think I’ve come to one conclusion…

…I don’t think I want to play an in-depth RPG on a handheld device.

I mean, the game looks great on my iPhone and I think the increased resolution vs. the DS did those updated graphics much better justice, but it’s still just not quite the same. And I think I’m quite ready to admit that it may just very well be that I’m getting older and I can’t stare at a 3.5″ screen for three hours on end anymore! When I play RPGs, I typically dive in for several hours at a time – snacks are involved, and a comfy spot on the couch, and mobile gaming just doesn’t provide that same experience for me.

Plus, for those long stretches I don’t really think that touch is the best interface for the controls … battles seem to take a lot longer than if I were able to just press A repeatedly through all of the battle screens when we’re strong enough to not need special abilities, but still need the XP to move on anyways.

Plus, I’ll be 100% honest – the increased difficulty I guess does kinda bug me because the result ends up being a different game for me than the nostalgic one that I remember. When I play FFIV, I’m not really looking for a new challenge – I’m looking to revisit an old favorite; if I wanted a new challenge, I’d play a new game. So yeah, it makes me not want to put time into it when I find myself getting slaughtered in areas that have never been overly challenging in the past.

In fact, I didn’t even make it through the Waterfall Cave with this go around – the screenshot you see below is about as far as I got before calling it a day. Maybe if it were a bigger screen like an iPad, though not likely still because of the controls … I think I’ve come to the conclusion that mobile RPGs just aren’t right for me. It’s too bad because there seems to be a ton of new/classic RPG content on handheld devices that I’d otherwise probably really enjoy, but let’s face it, if I didn’t enjoy the experience all that much with my favorite game of all-time, then what are the chances of me really being able to get into something new that I haven’t already loved since I was 12 years-old? 🙁

ffiv_iphone

So all of that said … I guess I’m seeking recommendations for console-based RPGs that I should give a try … unless perhaps some of these others end up pulling what Rock Star thankfully did for the GTA series and ends up releasing their handheld titles as console versions years after the fact. I know that the graphics won’t exactly be the same, but some of us are getting older and need that 52″ screen in order to see everything that’s going on! 😉