- Feature Articles
- CodeSOD
- Error'd
-
Forums
-
Other Articles
- Random Article
- Alex's Soapbox
- Announcements
- Best of…
- Best of Email
- Best of the Sidebar
- Bring Your Own Code
- Coded Smorgasbord
- Mandatory Fun Day
- Off Topic
- Representative Line
- News Roundup
- Editor's Soapbox
- Software on the Rocks
- Souvenir Potpourri
- Sponsor Post
- Tales from the Interview
- The Daily WTF: Live
- Virtudyne
Admin
Yeah, this isn't actually new to people who watch the forums. You got something before the front-page readers, congrats!
Admin
I mean, we all watch the Article category anyway.
Admin
Nope, I notificate the listener for the event stream!
Admin
Yeah, I actually almost just pointed the comment thread at the original thread in the sidebar, but realized a lot of forum folks would just be confused about why there wasn't a new article.
Admin
You could've Jeff'd the Sidebar thread into Article ;)
Admin
I told it there, and I'm gonna repeat it, and won't regret it once: this made me like the Lord of the Rings even better.
(sad smile)
Admin
This did come more from a place of, "the comparison is funny", but I'll be honest: I'm actually not that big a fan. I think the worldbuilding is tedious, and since the whole story exists to support worldbuilding, that's a bad thing.
I did enjoy Shadow of Mordor though.
Admin
I only hate the Lord of the Rings fans
Admin
What exactly do you mean by "tedious worldbuilding"? Do you mean that the way that the world is described throughout the story is not seamless enough and uninteresting (tedious to read?)
Yeah, fans are quite hateable in general, at least if what you mean by "fans" is "a group of people fanatically, uncritically and unconditionally dedicated to a work/creator and hysterically expressing their feelings".
Admin
I don't hate Lord of the Ring buy I sure like this article. Very good! Keep it coming!
Admin
Admin
Normal fans will just move some hot air around and won't do much harm unless being hit the wrong way.
Admin
Yeah, all this talking made me forget what I should have said first and foremost: hilarious video. :laughing:
The correct phrase is fanperson. I could page someone but I won't. :smiley:
Otherwise, fully agree. I just thought that such a definition of a "fan" could make me agree with @CreatedToDislikeThis .
Admin
I like this a lot more than Mandatory Fun Day or Radio WTF, and I'm glad it got a test piloting in the Sidebar before it was made "a thing". Thanks, @Remy!
Admin
Five pages on describing the perfectly ordinary bush that Bilbo is about to walk past does tend to be a bit of overkill and a distraction to the actual story...
Admin
Forum folks read the articles? Who knew?
Admin
Worldbuilding should be invisible to the reader. Like, I love books that take place in weird and strange settings that require explanation (Rajaniemi's Flambeur series, is one of my favorite reads). But I like them the best when I don't feel like somebody's built a story to show off this really cool world they had in mind.
//Caveat: I do like Greg Egan books, which 100% contradict what I just said, but even while Greg Egan writes entire trilogies based on "What if the sign of this one term in various relativistic equations was reversed?", he never invented Tom Bombadill. Seriously, Bombadill is just the worst.
Admin
He's there to justify the tie-in game, Super Bombadil Man!
Admin
Is it okay if I disagree? Worldbuilding is only annoying to me when it takes too long (you could argue that's the case in LOTR) or feels forced (often the case in long-running TV series or Hollywood movies, when they desperately need to introduce a new plot as quickly as possible and ruin the story in the process). But I don't mind exploring the world the author thought of and knowing I'm supposed to learn its rules while reading/watching.
Admin
Who, inexplicably, sings rambling songs at his enemies.
Admin
He's killing them softly with his song, is what he's doing :smile:
Admin
How I got that song stuck in my ear. I hope you're happy :angry:
Admin
And the Lord of the Rings hates you back
Admin
I didn't really notice that so much in LOTR. The Silmarillion, now that's a slog; I thought the story itself was interesting, but the editing by Christopher Tolkien — it needed to cut by about 50%.
Admin
I always want to start reading it, but read somewhere that there is no end, the author died before any conclusion. I do not like unfinished stories, no matter how long. What do you think?
Admin
That was really good. The only thing I didn't like about the video is that the table wasn't wooden enough.
Admin
J.R.R. did die before it was published; his son Christopher edited and published it after his death. It's been a few decades since I read it, so I don't remember exactly how the book ends, but I wouldn't say the story is unfinished. It is a prequel to the whole LOTR universe and describes how Middle Earth and the various races came to be, so I think it's fair to say LOTR is the end of the story. The main fault that I have with it is that every thing you encounter in the story is described and named in every single elven, dwarvish, human and whatever language that Tolkien thought of. Every. Single. One. It's cool that Tolkien invented all those languages, but the book is supposed to be a story, not a polyglot dictionary.
Admin
No frist?
[holding chest, staggering around] "Oh, it's the big one. I'm coming to join you,
EthelElizabeth."Admin
Elizabeth, but points for trying!
[image]Admin
Yeah, but just imagine if it were… burning! We could start a religion! :trolleybus:
But seriously, can you give some pointers to where the scene is? I've no recollection of that. :wink:
Admin
This is an awkward confession for a commenter to make, but I hated the video.
Almost eight minutes of video for what should have been a sixty second bit.
Please get an editor with a huge red pen (or I guess in the case of video, huge red scissors) to shorten the future bits into something that's actually worth sitting thru, and you know, funny.
Admin
Terry Pratchett (paraphrased): "If you read LotR at age 17 and didn't think it was the greatest story ever told, there's something wrong with you. If you are still reading LotR at age 35 and Still think it's the greatest story every told, there's something wrong with you."
Admin
Maybe that's my problem- I didn't read it at 17. I was in my mid-20s when I took a crack at it.
Admin
I used to hate that stuff the first few times I read LOTR. I really love it now, though. I suspect that's due to knowing the story more and being able to enjoy the detail now plus my own maturity as a reader.
Admin
It's more of a history book than a novel, though.
Admin
Who's version? Roberta Flack, Al B Sure, or the Fugees?
Admin
LotR is supposed to be a story, and before it, The Hobbit. But The Silmarilllion, I'm pretty sure is just a dictionary and encyclopedia. I couldn't read it.
Admin
I was 11. Didn't quite finish The Two Towers because I hit (what seemed at the time to an 11 year old) a long dry spot. Tried again at about 18, finished, enjoyed it. Still didn't like Bombadil. Again at 30 because the movies re-awakened my interest. Enjoyed it again. Still didn't like Bombadil.
Admin
The version I head in my head was from someone else, I think. I listened to all three, and none of them matched exactly.
Admin
Perry Como? I do not like this version https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0NeHAy-Btw0
And from the comments (don't know how accurate): Lori Lieberman - Killing Me Softly With His Song [1972] Perry Como - Killing Me Softly With Her Song [1973] Roberta Flack - Killing Me Softly With His Song [1973] Andy Williams - Killing Me Softly (With Her Song) [1974] Fugees - Killing Me Softly With His Song [1996]
Admin
Hm… Maybe I just made a remix out of different versions in my head.
Admin
As I said before, it has been a long time since I read it, but there are two things I recall about it. One is the previously described linguistic tedium. The other is the narrative of the creation of the world and various races, and which was a clear allegory of the Judeo-Christian creation mythos. The narrative extended through multiple chapters, not merely an encyclopedia entry.
Admin
I suppose you could say that, from what little I remember of it. But I found it as dry and undigestible as reading the Bible. It read to me at the time more like a rather large encyclopedia entry than a narrative.
Admin
GOGGLE_NOT_USED_EXCEPTION
Admin
Great, now i hate Lord of the Rings too.
Admin
Exactly. There is no such scene. Bilbo has a bit part in LotR (although he's the protagonist in The Hobbit) -- his position has been superseded by Frodo.
Methinks the writer of this post hasn't actually read it at all, but is just jumping on the let's-knock-LotR-like-everyone-else-and-thereby-prove-I'm-a-cool-and-groovy-person bandwagon by posting up something lame in a vain and completely unsuccessful attempt to be humorous.
As for the movies, they are not the books.
The books are what they are and are a child of their time. Tolkien himself admits he didn't know where they were going when they started: he was just making it up as he went along. He didn't know who Aragorn was when he introduced him into the plot, and he didn't know who Tom Bombadil was either. (Turned out that the latter was a bit of a lot dead-end and that entire incident (from the Brandywine to Bree) could have been excised with no loss to the plot.)
If you want to harangue a writer for overwriting, take a pop at Neal Stephenson who, for example, spent several pages of Cryptonomicon explaining how to eat a bowl of cereal, and even more pages detailing how the bedroom delights of a certain couple were optimised by a particular combination of serendipitous circumstances, both of which were completely irrelevant to the main plot and an editor really should have done a number on it.
Admin
Thanks for the explanation, turns out I understood you correctly. :smile:
And as he admitted quite a few years later, he'd also written a few passages where it was impossible to join the story with what his father left.
Hah, I feel similarly about Pratchett. If you read his books at the age of 12 and you don't think these are the funniest and most perceptive stories, there's something wrong with you. If you read it at the age of 20-something and you don't think that these are mostly a bit silly stories but they're great fun nevertheless, there's something wrong with you too. :laughing:
Admin
Some of his early work is a bit like that, but the majority of his midperiod work is insightful and literary, and of far greater worth than being "mostly a bit silly stories", but then you need a certain amount of intellectual depth to appreciate them, and it's possible that you might have just missed the subtleties and profundities. His later work is unfortunately a sad shadow of his best work, but that's a product of his illness.
Admin
Wrong.
I actually gave up reading part-way through one of the books and never went back to any them because I just couldn't face the, to me, tediously boring narrative.
Of course, I was using hyperbole in my Bilbo/bush scene (which the person you quoted picked up on, but you obviously didn't) but it describes perfectly how it felt to me to slog through them.
Admin
That's not unusual¹, and I don't fault him for it. I just wish he'd done a better job.
¹ For example, Mozart's great Requiem was only half-finished when he died; it was completed about three months later by Franz Süssmayr (and people have been arguing about that ever since), but it's still called "Mozart's Requiem." Inexplicably, Discourse needs a blank line before this paragraph in order to parse the Discomarkhtmlbbdown correctly. Adding the blank line between the
<hr>and this paragraph actually reduces the space between the<hr>and the paragraph in the (half-)baked output.