tags: LotR
2000
August
- 2000 Aug 7
- Anniversary of the Atomic Bomb
OK, back to Hiroshima. It's somewhat ironic that the U.S. is the only country that has actually used a nuclear bomb on somebody. This is seriously a grave atrocity. I wonder why we decided to use it against civilians? If anything, we ought to have nuked the Emperor [or Tojo]. I guess the elite really [do] protect the elite, [war or no war].
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2003
February
- 2003 Feb 25
- Why Gandalf Chose Not to Remove Saddam Hussein
If you’re going to parody something, either use the source material in a completely bizarre and unrelated way, or try to stay true to the source so that all the allusions are consistent
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December
- 2003 Dec 23
- i'm not dying, i just can't think of anything else better to do
it's like i've been in a coma ever since i arrived in l.a. on saturday. it is now tuesday and i couldn't really tell you what i've been doing the past few days. excepting sleeping. i've been averaging about 16-18 hours of sleep these past few days. my dad is convinced that i have infectious mononucleosis. i do have swollen lymph nodes and unremitting malaise and fatigue. but no pharyngitis.
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2006
March
- 2006 Mar 16
- HOWTO: create a horcrux
Now I haven’t read Harry Potter and the Half-Blooded Prince yet, but I stumbled upon the concept of the Horcrux randomly following links. The concept is familiar to any J.R.R. Tolkien fan, and clearly, there is at least one way known to create a Horcrux.
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April
- 2006 Apr 7
- rabbit holes (a tale that's been told over and over)
I finished rereading Memory, Thorn, and Sorrow by Tad Williams, which has been (like many other fantasy novels such as The Sword of Shannara and The Wheel of Time series) compared much to The Lord of the Rings. While there exists much older literature that could considered fantasy (for example, The Faerie Queen by Edmund Spenser written in the 16th century), I believe that it was Tolkien that allowed booksellers to actually have an entire marketing category devoted to such stuff.
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2007
March
- 2007 Mar 4
- torque, dust, and mist
In contrast to The Lord of the Rings and Middle Earth, where magic remains mysterious and arcane and it is never explained and dissected, there seems to be a tendency to technologize—or at least scientify—magic in more recent works of fantasy. In various worlds, magic is seen as a substance, a commodity, that can be altered, stored, and redistributed.
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July
- 2007 Jul 21
- archetypes dying in media res
Because of the release of Deathly Hallows today, I had to catch up and read Half-Blood Prince. One of the reasons why I had decided to put off reading it was because everyone had ruined the “big surprise,” which was the death of Albus Dumbledore.
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August
- 2007 Aug 24
- harry potter and the lord of the rings
This idea was stolen shamelessly from this page that satirically insinuates that Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows is a thinly-veiled rewrite of The Lord the Rings. Being the Middle-Earth
· Read more…loserotaku that I am, I had to adjust a few plot points:
September
- 2007 Sep 4
- meta: the snow queen
I haven’t been this affected by the death of a character ever since Gandalf fell into the abyss in Moria.
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2012
July
- 2012 Jul 7
- a single letter difference, and too much free time
I found myself thinking about the last section of The Lord of the Rings (that got cut out of the movies): the "Scouring of the Shire" chapter. And it occurred to me that "scouring" and "scourging" are only one letter apart. And while in common parlance, "scourging" just means whipping, I started thinking about the Scourging of Lordaeron in World of Warcraft, where cultists transform an entire kingdom's populace into ghouls and zombies, and so, what if Saruman was a necromancer, and he basically turned all the hobbits undead….
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2015
June
- 2015 Jun 24
- Beyond the Wall Where the Shadows Lie
Bran, Hodor, Meera, Jojen, and Coldhands are like the Frodo, Sam, and Gollum of A Song of Ice and Fire. They spend all this time wandering the wilderness for little discernible purpose and I suspect they're the most important part of the plot, but most people probably don't really care what happens to them.
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2016
April
- 2016 Apr 13
- Hugo Weaving
Since Middle Earth is really just supposed to be Earth, this means that The Lord of the Rings and "The Matrix" happen in the same universe. Agent Smith is really just Elrond after he went totally insane after countless millenia. And just like elves, agents cannot leave their plane of existence like humans can.
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