bunn

Rings of Power

2022-10-15T00:00:50Z

I just watched the last episode of the Amazon Rings of Power series, and am left overall with a feeling that the whole thing was very pretty, but somehow oddly small-scale, and full of missed opportunity.

I'm not entirely sure how I would have felt about it if I'd just watched it on its own, rather than seeing it heavily trailered, discussed, dissected and panned for weeks and weeks, which inevitably has an effect. I'm sure I wouldn't have noticed some of the weak points, such as the infamous printed-on scale armour.

It also didn't help that I'd been part of a long Second-Age roleplaying campaign that made a lot more effort to fit itself around the maps and events recorded in the various books, and have also written a few things set in that long empty time period, which again, I feel, fitted themselves reasonably convincingly around the dates and locations. Amazon was never going to tell the story the way I had told it to myself, and having made the timeline work for myself, I was never going to be happy with the idea of clumsily smooshing together the story in the interest of attempting to create a not-very-surprising surprise.

But I'm fairly sure that the painfully awkward dialogue would have seemed painful all on its own. And their Finrod. Argh. There are no words for how awkward his scenes felt, though I think Gil-galad was actually worse. Also the weird anti-halfelven prejudice against Elrond, which is nowhere in the text. Anything involving Valinor is complicated and difficult to do at the best of time, and I don't think they carried it off.

There were good things. Robert Aramayo made a surprisingly convincing Elrond, and I liked his friendship with Durin and his wife. The Numenorean ships were impressively weird, though oddly few in number. I liked the social darkness to the pre-hobbit Harfoot backstory. I thought Arondir and Adar, two of the original characters from the storyline set in pre-Mordor, were both compelling characters.

But apart from that... I don't know if I want to go on watching. I might wait till the end and then dip in and out, I suppose.

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Hmmph

2022-01-21T21:45:08Z

I decided I would watch the series 'A Discovery of Witches' largely because parts of season 3 have been shot locally to where I live.

First few episodes were pretty and watchable (though it's always slightly weird seeing Fairytale Oxford with all the plastic and concrete bits cgi'd out).

But then it took a hard swerve into Super-Special Protagonist And Romance and somehow... the protagonist who initially seemed to have quite a strong personality and opinions sort of morphed into a plastic doll who does a lot of standing and prettily reacting to things (in that does stuff with eyes and mouth but not actually saying anything or making her own decisions way) even though apparently she was genetically the Chosen One, and the romance began to trip my 'oh come on these people have literally zero chemistry' switch in the same way that Tristran and Isolde (JUST KEEP YOUR PANTS ZIPPED FFS) do.

Anyway, I'm not watching in any very coordinated or intelligent manner because the cold is still making me zonked but I am not sure I shall make it to season 3.

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Highlander

2021-06-18T19:50:26Z

Have finally got around to watching the TV series Highlander from the beginning rather than catching the odd episode here and there.

It's quite watchable, but there are too many Immortals and not enough scenes where Duncan encounters perfectly normal human beings and reminisces about people he knew who were just as foolish two hundred years previously.

It's weird that nowadays it's easier to watch old TV that you vaguely heard about and never got around to, then work out where to find new TV and realise you don't have a subscription to that.

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Things

2020-04-16T22:24:01Z

So far, no motion from any of the seeds I'm trying to sprout. Possibly they are all Too Old.( Cut for art )
In other creative news, I randomly picked up my bamboo flute and played it a bit today, and then, feeling inspired, dug out my ancient clarinet and music books. It's SO LONG since I played, I had almost forgotten how to read music, and to begin with I couldn't get the top notes, but once I had played for a bit, it started coming back. I think I'll try it again tomorrow.

I feel like I'm sort of standing still a lot of the time. I know that the world for most people has changed fundementally and in very difficult ways, yet here, we have made small accommodations, but life poddles on not very unlike its state before. It feels wrong somehow, though I have no idea what would feel right. On the other hand, I have made some art and a little music, and that's a small achievement at least.

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So, March ends. Now, what horrors await in April?

2020-04-01T18:58:06Z

Took the hounds out for a longer solo walk yesterday. Theo was pulling on the lead quite a bit to start with, but my iffy knee felt FINE and so I proceeded to walk all the way up onto the top of Hingston Down and along as far as Drakewalls before turning for home. It was pretty quiet, though I did see a few walkers at a distance here and there.

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The time has come, the Walrus said, to talk of many things

2019-06-17T14:12:34Z

Because I have not posted for a while, and this is potentially DISASTROUS as I rarely remember things if I don't write them down.

- Yesterday I took 8 large paintings, four small paintings and 5 paintings in mounts and envelopes for the 'browser' (which is one of those y-shaped floor stand things where you flick through a bit pile of art) to Tavistock, for the Tavistock Group of Artists annual exhibition.

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- on Saturday, we watched the Chernobyl HBO/Sky miniseries.

Wow. I had no idea that the Chernobyl disaster was not a pure unforseen accident rather than what appears to have been a cocktail of really terrible management, secrecy, and ambition combined with a near-insane lack of caution.

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It also created an interesting link with another superb miniseries we watched recently, Good Omens, which begins with this statement:

“It may help to understand human affairs to be clear that most of the great triumphs and tragedies of history are caused, not by people being fundamentally good or fundamentally bad, but by people being fundamentally people.”

Which provides a nearly complete explanation of Chernobyl, really. Fortunately neither miniseries ended with the threatened Apocalypse, though Chernobyl was 99% more depressing than Good Omens.

I can see many fun re-watches of G.O. ahead, but I shall probably never rewatch Chernobyl, though I thought it was brilliant, and I am very glad I saw it.

Also on Saturday, we got rid of a couple of chairs that have been lurking in the diningroom by advertising them on Facebook as free (because the cats had had a go at them and they were quite severely scratched) A lot of people wanted our scratched chairs, but it proved oddly difficult to get someone to actually come and take them: the first person dropped out, so I contacted the other people who had left messages, but ALL 6 of them had already sourced other chairs! So I advertised again, and second time lucky. But clearly free things move fast on Facebook, and now I have space for some shelves for art supplies, which is welcome because at the moment they are not so much stored as strewn.

What else has happened? Oh, Fankil continues to improve and become less scaredy. He often hangs out in the livingroom in the evenings, and also you can now rub his ears and his tummy and he purrs!

Took Rosie up to the hill-fort yesterday, and she hared about looking for rabbits, then well, OK, she didn't exactly come back, but she did stand still and let me put the lead back on, which, in a large empty space far from roads, will do.

Oh, and because I had some spare Perspex, I decided to try a design that could be painted on Perspex to be mounted in a window. Glass/Perspex paint really shows every blob or hesitation, so I drew this out several times before deciding on this design:

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Aaaaargh!

2019-05-07T12:04:49Z

I have watched the TV series 'Fargo', in which increasingly hideous and bloody things happen against a mundane backdrop of Minnesota life.

Turns out that, if, like me, you have no other connotations for a Minnesota accent *other* than 'Fargo', if you hear two people wandering along chatting in a dull manner and praising the colour of the azaleas, in exactly that accent...

It is TERRIFYING. I automatically froze and looked around for the body. :-D

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