Disqus - Latest Comments for anobium

Re: Ana Mardoll's Ramblings: Open Thread: Light Reflected Off Wet Containers

Paul A. — Tue, 03 Dec 2019 04:50:08 -0000

Snow is no problem, but I got a sunburn a couple of days ago that hasn't entirely faded yet.

(It's summer here, so this answer may not be entirely in the spirit of the question.)

Re: Ana Mardoll's Ramblings: November Newsletter (2019)

Paul A. — Fri, 01 Nov 2019 22:01:57 -0000

Yay for having a friend!

Re: Ana Mardoll's Ramblings: Open Thread: An old sunset

Paul A. — Wed, 30 Oct 2019 18:01:23 -0000

If you enjoy Ana's film corner twitter threads, you might also enjoy this (I am): Lauren Walker of Truthout.org livetweeting her first time reading Dracula: https://twitter.com/xoDrVen...

Re: Ana Mardoll's Ramblings: Film Corner: Alien

Paul A. — Wed, 09 Oct 2019 19:16:03 -0000

Scott P., wow, that's a pretty patronizing comment.

Re: Ana Mardoll's Ramblings: Open Thread: White and Green

Paul A. — Fri, 27 Sep 2019 22:20:16 -0000

I think the "and Green" is appropriate. It might be background green, but it creates the context for the foreground. It wouldn't be the same if it was just an image of White.

Re: Ana Mardoll's Ramblings: Open Thread: More Purple

Paul A. — Sat, 21 Sep 2019 20:07:27 -0000

Nice!

The mysterious wossnames could be cape gooseberries.

Re: Ana Mardoll's Ramblings: Film Corner: Arn

Paul A. — Sun, 15 Sep 2019 18:40:42 -0000

The problem was that the family could not afford to pay for 2 DOWRIES.

I wondered about that, but while it answers the people in the comments saying that weddings needn't be that expensive, I don't think it helps with Ana's original objection, which was that nunneries could also be expensive and that a working family who couldn't afford the costs associated with a marriage (whatever form those costs took) would be more likely to keep their daughter home to help with the family business.

Re: Ana Mardoll's Ramblings: Film Corner: Merlin

Paul A. — Mon, 02 Sep 2019 09:46:38 -0000

I honestly can't remember any legends about young Merlin, though surely there must have been some.

The one I'm most familiar with is the one where King Vortigern is having some troubles and his royal druids or whatever tell him it can be solved by sacrificing a boy with no natural father, so they try to sacrifice young Merlin but he gets out of it by proving he knows his shit better than the royal druids and solving the king's problem for him. Part of the problem involves two dragons, one red and one white, which are simultaneously actual real dragons and also metaphors for Wales and England.

This is not that story, but I can see signs that the screenwriter probably heard that story at some point.

I'd like to see a story where the apprentice who quits goes on to have a meaningful life helping people and his impatience wasn't a marker of being evil, he just had different priorities.

Now that you mention it, I feel like I have seen a story like that somewhere, but I don't remember where. Maybe it'll come back to me later.

Re: Ana Mardoll's Ramblings: Open Thread: Yellow and Orange

Paul A. — Wed, 21 Aug 2019 20:48:02 -0000

That would have been a great take on the Two-Face story.

Re: Ana Mardoll's Ramblings: Film Corner: Cyclops

Paul A. — Wed, 21 Aug 2019 20:39:51 -0000

I gather from fiction I've read that back when Latin was still regularly taught in English schools, pronunciation was a Thing, with one camp preferring to teach the familiar pronunciations and another camp preferring to teach the authentic pronunciations. (There's a bit about it in Goodbye Mr Chips, for one, where Mr Chipping teaches Latin; I don't recall off the top of my head which camp he was in, but I do recall him having to deal with the education authorities making it mandatory for the other pronunciations to be taught.)

Another pronunciation thing I often see in that context is the pronunciation of the letter v, as in "Yuleus Kaisar looked at his defeated opponents and said, 'Weenie, weedy, weaky.'"

Re: Ana Mardoll's Ramblings: Film Corner: Season of the Witch

Paul A. — Mon, 19 Aug 2019 19:19:59 -0000

Thanks, Ana.

Re: Ana Mardoll's Ramblings: Film Corner: Dragon

Paul A. — Mon, 19 Aug 2019 19:17:37 -0000

I figure if the only way you can get a dragon in this particular universe is by having a mage create one, that means it's an unnatural creature.

(As someone once said, all magical effects are unnatural by definition; if they didn't disrupt the natural order, they wouldn't be magical.)

Re: Ana Mardoll's Ramblings: Film Corner: Season of the Witch

Paul A. — Mon, 19 Aug 2019 06:05:21 -0000

I'm disappointed. I had a side bet on Pretty Boy to be the witch. I suppose this is the wrong kind of movie for a twist like that.

Also, now I'm vaguely wondering about the witch who comes back to life at the beginning: was she the one who confessed, the one who denied, or the one who told the priest to burn in hell?

Re: Ana Mardoll's Ramblings: Film Corner: Cyclops

Paul A. — Fri, 16 Aug 2019 06:25:57 -0000

Rome is a republic now and there will be no more emperors, the end.

Which makes it especially weird that they picked Tiberius as their evil emperor, considering how many emperors there actually were after him (ie. nearly all of them).

Has Eric Roberts ever been in a good movie?

He was in--well, no, objectively that wasn't a good movie, though I liked it at the time. Um. He was in The Dark Knight as a mob boss? Some people say that's a good movie?

(I tried looking at his IMDb page to jog my memory, but it was hard to pick out anything specific in the flood of titles. That man keeps himself busy.)

Re: Ana Mardoll's Ramblings: Film Corner: Dragon

Paul A. — Fri, 16 Aug 2019 06:06:23 -0000

how Necromancy and Dragon Making are in the same wheelhouse, I don't know

Giving life to things that ought not to be alive, maybe?

Re: Ana Mardoll's Ramblings: Open Thread: Placeholder

Paul A. — Mon, 12 Aug 2019 20:11:52 -0000

WanderingUndine, I can see that, now you describe it.

In my experience the specific shape of a character usually doesn't signify anything in this kind of ascii art, only the impression it gives of "dark" vs "light". (eg. "M" is a dark pixel because it's mostly letter, while " : " is a light pixel because it's mostly white space)

Many years ago, when Fidonet was the big social medium and pixel art was one of the main ways of sharing images online, I had a program that automatically converted ascii art back into a pixel image. I don't have it on this computer, though, and if there's anything like that on the web it's buried in the Google results by all the sites offering to turn pixel images into ascii art.

Re: Ana Mardoll's Ramblings: Open Thread: Placeholder

Paul A. — Sat, 10 Aug 2019 19:43:56 -0000

If it's the placeholder image I think it is, it's two triangles and a circle arranged to resemble mountains and the sun.

Sending good wishes your way for really going to Belize.

Re: Ana Mardoll's Ramblings: Film Corner: Dragonquest

Paul A. — Fri, 09 Aug 2019 23:51:26 -0000

The Test of Patience isn't the destination, the Test of Patience is the journey. At least, for the audience it is.

Re: Ana Mardoll's Ramblings: Open Thread: Placeholder

Paul A. — Fri, 09 Aug 2019 23:44:22 -0000

I'm reminded once again that I'm glad I didn't bother with any of the Arkham games after City.

Re: Ana Mardoll's Ramblings: Narnia: High and Lonely Destiny

Paul A. — Sat, 20 Jul 2019 19:09:33 -0000

Again: there's not one civilization technology tree that every planet has to follow, and I'm not demanding robots and flying cars, but when you've got wooden wheels ("creaking of wheels...chariots") for transportation and your population is composed of manual laborers ("slaves") who are themselves motivated by overseers flicking animal hide at them ("cracking of the whips"), then this feels pretty dang "early human development" for a world that's supposed to be far more ancient than earth.

Maybe the idea is that they never developed physical technology because they didn't need it; there wasn't anything they wanted that couldn't be achieved with magic and/or slaves.

(That is, the people who owned the magic and the slaves had everything they wanted. The slaves presumably were kept too busy to be developing natural philosophy in their spare time.)

I have vague memories of other things Lewis has written suggesting that he thought physical technology was a bad idea and not a sign of a truly advanced society anyway, but I don't recall which. Hideous Strength, maybe?

Re: Ana Mardoll's Ramblings: Open Thread: Purple

Paul A. — Sun, 07 Jul 2019 03:36:40 -0000

" this is Captain America: Civil War all over again except larger"

Oh good, I made the right decision when I decided not to see it, then.

Re: Ana Mardoll's Ramblings: Film Corner: Hobbit (Five Armies)

Paul A. — Wed, 26 Jun 2019 05:47:31 -0000

I would say that’s in line with them calling the previous film after something not happening in it but in this one though.

If memory serves, the Desolation of Smaug isn't an event, it's a geographical feature: it's the name of the area around the Lonely Mountain that has been laid to waste by Smaug's raids since he came to live there. So it does appear in the film of that title, as well as in this one, though maybe the link isn't clearly established in the film itself.

Re: Ana Mardoll's Ramblings: Film Corner: Hobbit (Five Armies)

Paul A. — Mon, 24 Jun 2019 11:18:21 -0000

It says something about the priorities guiding the making of this trilogy that there's a whole film named after, and a significant percentage of its running time devoted to, the battle that the book spends less than a chapter describing.

And it particularly bothers me, though I'm not sure I could put good words around why, that the main characters who die in the battle don't die in the battle, but off in little separate special duels that recognise their status as main characters, while all the less important characters fight the actual battle in the background. In the book, Thorin takes his death wound from nobody in particular, in the midst of the main fight alongside his kinsfolk.

After I saw this movie in the cinema, one of the first things I did when I got home was to get on the internet and confirm my suspicion that people would have already started doing fan-edits, which of course they had. I saw a report that somebody had taken the trilogy and edited out everything that wasn't in the book -- all the stuff Gandalf does where Bilbo can't see him, everything Legolas and Tauriel do after the dwarves leave Mirkwood and as much as possible before that, a bunch of stuff with Azog, and so on -- and ended up with just enough movie left to make a single reasonable-length movie. I didn't follow it up any further, so I don't know if it was really true, but a part of me would be delighted if it was.

While I have you here, I also still want this. [Link: https://october-26.livejour...]

Some solid picks there, particularly the wizards. And I'm amused that gender-swapped Orlando Bloom is Keira Knightley.

Re: Ana Mardoll's Ramblings: Film Corner: Hobbit (Desolation of Smaug)

Paul A. — Mon, 24 Jun 2019 06:34:19 -0000

The LotR Wiki says the visit to Beorn happened in the film, but I don't remember it at all. Such a shame, as I had especially loved that part of the book.

It's another bit that was significantly abridged to fit more battles in. For one thing, they completely dropped the sequence where Gandalf tells Beorn the Story So Far, which sticks in my memory because they arrive at Beorn's house at the beginning of the movie, right after the made up scene setting up the premise, and I remember wondering at the time why they didn't just use the already-existing Beorn scene for that purpose.

I've aeen a reader claim that Gandalf wanted Smaug to be gotten rid of so Sauron could never use him as a weapon/minion. ... Was this motivation stated in the film?

I vaguely recall something of the sort being said, but I haven't retained any details.

Re: Ana Mardoll's Ramblings: Film Corner: Hobbit (Unexpected Journey)

Paul A. — Thu, 20 Jun 2019 20:01:40 -0000

Ymfon, I like that.

I think it could still work with King Granddad being the one who lost the mountain; King Dad could either be too close to the source to be prepared to admit his father's faults, or just too focused on the immediate job of making diaspora dwarfdom work to be interested in foolhardy schemes to win the mountain back. That would be more complicated to put across to the audience, admittedly.