That thing goes for big money on eBay!

Shouldn't you still be reading it?

::rimshot::

I like turtles.

He's a zombie! Cut off his head!

Chocolate or reptile?

I had the good fortune to get to see a couple of aldabra tortoises doing the hunka chunka at the Cleveland Zoo a few years back. It was rather fascinating...slow and deliberate, but fascinating.

This is exactly where I was going with what I was saying. Haven and Harpua at et cetera, etcetera.

(HCRealm's spellcheck officially sucks. It tells me that both "et cetera" and "etcetera" are misspelled, but is fine with "etc." Yes, Common (Mis)Usage is really to blame, but I choose to lay it on HCRealms. If the Mods can handle infractions in much the same manner, I should be able to get away with it.)

I'm sure you're gonna wanna Nerd Flog me for this, but I've never seen the whole thing all the way through. I was in my teens when it came out, and it's really quite painful. It has some great imaginative moments, it looks really pretty, and its a well made film, but the dialogue and delivery is honestly laughable; if not uncomfortable.
BAD LPC! Don't touch that paragraph!
I never had any interest in the book.

The points you make are valid and accurate, but I'm only talking about Sorcerer's Stone.

Time Bandits is a great movie that follows this layout. It does not, in the process of tramping around the sandbox, trample on any beloved source material.

The Farce and the Furriest is a serious of lousy movies that also follow this layout. Seriously, have you seen the Onion interview with the director? While playing Hot Wheels or SST Racers (for the mature crash up players) these films also manage to not total any beloved source material.

I played with Kenner Star Wars figures as a child. We never stuck to the source material. That doesn't by any stretch mean that our childish and insipid storylines should have been used for any future mov. . . Oh, sorry, Lucas did that for us.

I agree that the descriptions get wordy. Strangely, its the geographic descriptions that get to me. I'm okay with the clothing descriptions although they do go on. I'm often annoyed at books that introduce characters and give you NO basic descriptions. Sometimes I can't even tell if they are male or female depending on the name!

Is that an Adventure People reference?

That's what I took it as. Those things were awesome!

You mentioned names. With F&I I remember when I was early into the books that I was wanting to smack GRRM for making half of the cast of characters have names with a "JOR" sound. (Jorah, Jory, Jeor, more?)
I figure it was a case of self ego stroking on GEORge's part.


BTW, I have it on good authority that GRRM doesn't wash his hands after peeing. Also, he has no qualms about doing this and then immediately going to a buffet luncheon spread where he neglects to use the tongs to grab his food.

I love your analogy. About rule books.

I also disagree with Ignatz, but only slightly and in a different way.

The Hobbit is as it's described above.

The Silmarillion and all the Lost/Unfinished Tales stuff IS the archivist stuff. (Have you read any of this? I was such a Tolkien nut at one point that I read all of it. I enjoyed it almost not at all. I felt like it was a homework assignment I'd assigned to myself.)

LotR, in my opinion, is a pleasant mix of the two. There are times when it veers toward archivist, but that can also be a cultural/anachronistic thing. I always took it that way. There were parts when I thought, "This OLD dude from ENGLAND didn't write this for this child of the 70s/80s in the US."

Good point. To me, the difference is WHEN someone thinks it's time to explain or when the topic has been "brought up". And there's a difference between telling someone they aren't allowed to eat it, and doing everything short of that. "I don't eat veal because, to me, it's amoral to do so." doesn't tell anyone that they are not allowed to eat it.

Anyway, I'm fine with you not eating veal. Hell, I can totally wrap my head around the reasons that people don't eat any meat. Maybe that's exactly why I don't like it when they get all high and mighty or take any excuse to go off on the subject. But I doubt that you are like that in person. . . and while dining.

Anime Flavor is a (probably) virus-ridden site where you can watch all manner of cartoons. (Ensure that your virus software is kick-ass and up to date before visiting.)

I also noticed the violence/nonviolence thing. I think that, much like BTAS, they are surfing that line as best as they can. I'm fine with seeing things happen off-screen or seeing people survive in situations where the people making the show are giving me the wink and nod that they didn't really survive. I know what they are up against. I've done presentations on "violent" media and children. There's a zealous group of people out there who make their living off of convincing parents and teachers that The Power Rangers are going to have their kids joining gangs or Columbining a school and I did what I could to bring some common sense to the dialogue. Again, another of those reasons I'm not teaching in a school anymore.

Anyway, I understand what they are doing and the constraints under which they are doing it. It almost makes me smile more when there IS unmitigated violence or death. Hmm, the anti-violence-safety-fascist moms seem to have failed utterly there.

Great point about the "tone" and "feel" that's probably what's keeping me around.

There's an EU book called Tales from the Empire. Many of the stories end up with defections to the Rebels and so forth, but they do show the "galaxy far, far, away" from a different perspective.

There's also several issues of Star Wars Tales (comic) that do the same. My favorite is Apocalypse Endor. It does its best to make Endor Vietnam and the Imperials into US soldiers. My views on 'Nam aside, I saw an interview with Lucas after Jedi came out where he said the idea of the Ewoks fighting the Empire did spring from a project he had wanted to do about Vietnam.

Great point about Legolas and Gimli. There's parts of that which stayed very true to the flavor of the text.

Again, I don't think EVERYTHING about the films was ruined. I LOVE the "feel" of The Shire. The visuals as well as the music is all dead-on as far as I'm concerned. I could watch that film up to Weathertop over and over and be content.

The forbidden love to which I refer is Aragorn and Arwyn and the whole "my daddy doesn't like you" thing. Elrond is, like, Aragorn's great great grand fatherunclecousinsomething. Now, let's just step around the Siegfried and Sieglinde comparisons that one could make, and just concentrate on the fact that Elrond is totally behind their betrothal. He does everything he can to help Aragorn in his quest to become king and marry Arwyn.

They had to cut out a lot of stuff that I would have liked to see (No! NOT Bombadil) and, instead, they added extra scenes dedicated to this made-up forbidden love story.

Oh, and all those amazing Spielbergian scenes during Helm's Deep of people in the caves doing nothing more than LOOKING.

Yeah, one of the big reasons that I've never gotten around to writing out a definitive explanation of my dislike of the LotR movies is that I don't have that kind of time on my hands.

Yes, I write a lot on here. But that's during times when I'm at the rink sitting and waiting or other times like that where I don't have anything better to do.

I love your shot at yourself and all of us about little plastic superheroes. It's good to keep everyone's perspective sharp.

The "logic" behind my statement is that it's possible to for someone to say, "Hey, if we go down this slippery slope, it's going to suck." and have everyone think he's just paranoid. There may come a time when others realize that the guy who pointed out the slippery slope had a point. Often, it's only after things get REALLY bad that they ever realize it.

You've never had a buddy get really into some girl who you could plainly see was petty, manipulative, and potentially abusive?

You know how one of their hands was always stuck in that "I might be holding the top of a steering wheel, but I might also be pointing" position?

In college, I hung out with a group of guys, and being Adventure People is what we did. Camping, paddling, climbing, hiking, just about anything outdoors was our answer to frat parties and the like. Often, in the middle of an adventure, we'd suddenly realize we WERE Adventure People, and we'd give each other the Adventure People Salute.

Yes.

You get 772 Fisher-Price bucks!

Oh yeah!

The transparent green couple and the scuba diver made great supporting cast members in my Star Wars adventures.

1. Watch some Inuyasha. Dear, God, if I have to try to keep straight the difference between any more characters name Blahblahomeru, I might go insane(er).

2. When I was in the Army, I was stationed at a Naval Base. Every branch was represented. (Yes, even the Coast Guard.) I was in the Latrine when some dumb Jarhead who called it the Head walked in. I went from the urinal to the door and as I reached for the handle he said, "In the Corps they taught us to wash our hands." I said, "In the Army, they taught us not to urinate on hour hands."

Urinate is a multi-syllabic word, so I don't think he understood, and, beyond that, urine is sterile, but I think you get the point.

3. The Numbered Listpire Strikes Back!