I went to an university where an entire student housing complex is called “Middle Earth”
Each dorm is named after something from the LotR. And the food commons is called Pippin.
Here’s a brief description of each:
Middle Earth was built in three phases:
* Phase I opened in 1974 with seven (7) halls: Hobbiton, Isengard, Lorien, Mirkwood, Misty Mountain, Rivendell, and The Shire. Brandywine Commons, and Brandywine Student Center (BSC) are also in Middle Earth.
* Phase II opened in 1989-90 and it includes 13 halls: Balin, Harrowdale, Whispering Wood, Woodhall, Calmindon, Grey Havens, Aldor, Rohan, Gondolin, Snowbourn, Elrond, Shadowfax, and Quenya. Phase II also includes Pippin Dining Commons, the housing office, and Bucklebury Library.
* Phase III opened in Fall 2000 and includes four (4) halls: Crickhollow, Evenstar, Oakenshield, and Valimar. Arkenstone, a 24-hour academic resource and study center, officially opened in fall of 2007.
Ah… I had some good times freshmen year in Middle Earth. Though I never got the chance to live in the Shire… The good old days…
This is my first post. I felt the need to join and comment after listening to the Lord of the Rings arc. First, I would like to say it would have been a better experience if the podcast had mentioned they were specifically talking about the Peter Jackson films or the books or both. I would be painting minis and catch myself yelling at the stereo because it seemed that no one on the podcast had read the books and had formed opinions based solely on the films.
(I have a friend who never read the books and tried to join a conversation about LotR and got upset when we told him that the films completely, in our opinions, had ruined some of our favorite characters and scenes from the books.)
Changes to major characters, such as the ones made in the LotR films, can be a major mistake. Aragorn never doubted himself or who he was. He was raised to be the King of Arnor and Gondor or to be the father of the next Chieftain of the Dunedain. Faramir was closer to the blood of Numenor than his father or brother and was never tempted by the ring. There were NO ELVES at Helms Deep. Elrond wanted Arwen to be with Aragorn even though he knew she would grow old and die. These are some of the best parts of the books and changing them made the films and entirely different creature.
Welcome aboard! I love seeing what finally tips people into joining the forums.
You’re right, as far as I can recall, about the distinction between the books and the movies. I believe the casts were about both, but they had seen the movies recently and they were foremost in their minds at the time.
I hear what you’re saying about the changes in the movies. I’ve mentione elsewhere (probably above) that I’m OK with the elves at Helm’s Deep, and I abhor what they did to Faramir. I’m not sure I agree with you about Aragorn, but it’s been long enough since I read the books that I may be too fuzzy there.
The parts about Aragorns destiny are laid out more clearly in the Silmarillion but are there in the LotR books.
Elrond giving him the Shards of Narsil, the Ring of Barahir and the the Star of Elendil, but holding the Rod of Annuminas and the hand of Arwen until Aragorn was King of both Arnor and Gondor are in the books.
He was raised at Rivendell, just like all 38 previous Chieftains of the Dunedain and taught about his obligation.
Yeah, ideally so with me (well, OK, not the Silmarillion, but LotR.) However my list of yearly reads has grown. Snow Crash, Cryptonomicon, Moby Dick, Neuromancer, etc.
Thotfullguy recommended the Simarillion to me on audio, but I can’t find it at Audible, where I have a subscription.
I’d really like to give that a go! Maybe they have it at the library… hrmmm…
I have a stack of print books to read and only a couple I haven’t yet gotten to on audio. Dilemma…
I believe the movies were the main focus of the arc due to the time constraint. It’s a given that not all will make the translation from book to film, and as an avid reader, I have to say that I really enjoyed the ride!
Catching up to the 'cast in the past few days, and I have two main things to mention.
Dollhouse: That episode that Audra singled out as being particularly great? I find it interesting that in interviews Joss Whedon singled out that episode as an example of the ones that really didn’t work, but then later somewhat retracted his statement or, more accurately, clarified it from how people were interpreting it (you can find a rather extensive interview from April with Whedon here where he says it) . . . much like Sean’s Modern Warfare 2 statements! Which I as well misinterpreted before reading this thread here.
I also want to say that anyone out there that counts themselves as a Whedon fan, you owe it to yourselves to check out Tim Minear’s back catalogue too. It’s often been his collaborations with Joss Whedon that have made Whedon’s work so good.
I’m a particularly big fan of The Inside which was basically an exercise in “what happens if you let sci-fi writers and actors do a crime procedural?” The result is both funnier and far, far darker than any of the other crime procedurals out there. And the talent involved is astonishing.
On the writers side you have of course the aforementioned Tim Minear, then Jane Espenson (Buffy, Firefly, BSG…), David Fury (Buffy, Angel, Lost…), and Ben Edlund (Firefly, Angel, Supernatural, oh yeah and he created The Tick).
On the actors side you have people like Jay Harrington who currently plays the title character on Better Off Ted (which you guys ARE watching, right? I mean, it’s a sci-fi sitcom!) and Adam Baldwin (ie. Jayne from Firefly and John Casey in Chuck). And the guest actors kick things up every time too; one episode I was suddenly astonished when I realized that playing the world’s most batshit-insane couple was Amber Benson (Tara from Buffy) and Matt Keeslar (who played the titular character on The Middleman, which of course you should also check out if you haven’t). And boy are they creepy together!
So yeah. Inbetween Angel going off the air and Dollhouse starting Tim Minear and a bunch of the Buffy/Firefly/Angel writers and actors were off doing brilliant things. Another example of course is Drive, which sounds like a pitch that FOX couldn’t possibly cancel: an illegal cross-country road race, starring Nathan Fillion basically playing Mal again. At least with that one all the episodes are up on iTunes and Unbox, but unfortunately only 6 were ever made (and only 4 ever aired…seriously, how do these networks think that they’ve given a show a fair shake after FOUR episodes?).
I guess what I’m asking is, can we have a “prematurely cancelled shows by Tim Minear” arc sometime?
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2: (Jedi Academy?): I felt like adding one more reason that the copyright protections are problematic: many of the times they entirely break my ability to install legitimate copies of games! In the past I’ve gone out and bought games that I then had to go and get a cracked, illegal version of the game to be able to play. This is because as a die-hard non-conformist and as a computer geek I just can’t stand Windows, so I have to run my games through somewhat of a hack itself, WINE (which stands for Wine Is Not an Emulator . . . gotta love recursive acronyms). This works fine for well-written games, but the problem is that the “technological protection mechanisms” (that’s how they’re known in legal terms) tend to themselves be huge hacks, which thus fail when running on something other than Windows itself.
So I often find myself in the position of having a game which my PC setup is perfectly able to play, but because it can’t run the copyright protection nonsense I can’t play the game. This is not always true, and again you can tell when the code for a game’s protection is well-written instead of an ugly hack because it tends to work (the most recent version of Wine, for example, fixed support for L4D2’s DRM). But more often than not I end up in a position where I know that whether or not I legitimately purchase a game I’m going to have to download a crack to play it. That’s absurd, and it brings up the old adage “better to let ten guilty men go free than to imprison one innocent man”. And that’s an adage that these companies are completely ignoring. (Admittedly this doesn’t directly apply to MW2, since apparently that runs basically fine in Wine, but I’m speaking more generally).
Also I’d like to bring up Starcraft. Why? Well, because Starcraft already had a solution to the LAN-yet-copyright-protection problem back in 1998! So the MW2 devs don’t have much of an excuse; the real reason for no LAN is just because MW2 is being developed primarily (or at least, equally) as a console game, and console games themselves have been shying away from LAN for awhile now (read into that whatever you will). So like most game devs these days they just used piracy as an excuse for design/business decisions that are hard to directly defend (like Epic Games claiming that the Gears of War PC version did so badly because of piracy…conveniently ignoring the fact that the PC version was so buggy nearly no-one could play it when it first came out, or the fact that the port was so long after the 360 version).
As a final word, though. I don’t think the pirates are the ones complaining about the lack of LAN. I really, really don’t think so . . . because apparently there’s a working MP hack out there anyways. So all of that was for nothing.
Not to double post, but I just noticed this in the interview I quoted above:
MR: Just to get back to how the season unfolded, the idea that the Dollhouse is part of a much larger scheme or entity, was that your plan from the beginning?
JW: That was more – that came from Fox. My original conception was, the Dollhouse really was its own organization, this black market wing of this big corporation that was doing a lot of good. And that this really was a very private experience. Fox said, “We would be more interested if they were up to no good.” I said, “Well, OK.”
MR: So if I understand correctly, your original conception was that this was a bunch of good guys making their money off …
JW: Making money off of bad guys’ endeavors. It’s like, they are doing important brain research and helping cure things and around the world the most respected medical facility, blah blah blah. But under the boards, they’re funding themselves with this naughty place.
MR: And Fox wanted the corporation to be up to no good?
JW: They [said, “The Dollhouse] has all this information, it would be interesting if they were using it in a different way than just keeping it secret.” So the questions become, who’s involved in that, who really believes that they’re doing something weirdly altruistic, and who knows if there’s some greater scheme at work?
Speaking as someone who has seriously enjoyed Epitaph One and the more recently 6 episodes of Dollhouse, which have all been predicated on the “up to no good” premise . . . dear lord. So FOX canceled Dollhouse, but it was them that saved the plot of what was made? Wow, even the backstory behind the plot of Dollhouse is a mindfuck.
Speaking as someone who has seriously enjoyed Epitaph One and the more recently 6 episodes of Dollhouse, which have all been predicated on the “up to no good” premise . . . dear lord. So FOX canceled Dollhouse, but it was them that saved the plot of what was made? Wow, even the backstory behind the plot of Dollhouse is a mindfuck.
this is what i got out of reading that Whedon interview.
At first Fox wanted a more standalone show. They asked for it. Seen in the interview here:
JW: Fox said, “Do the standalone episodes so that people can understand it so that people can get into the mythology,” which I get.
I mean there are great standalone episodes. But the stories that make the viewers stay aren’t the standalone stories. Therefore the pilot at least should NOT be a standalone, because it needs to setup the characters. And to have the first half of season 1 all be standalone episodes is exactly why even a lot of the scifi fans didn’t bother to check out the rest of the show. That is where Fox is wrong.
the way it should be is “setup the mythos so people will want to stay for the standalones, maybe-ish”. Unless your show is setup for nonsensical fun, I don’t see how it would be the FOX’s way.
Besides, Joss had a different version of “mythos”. It would be more along the lines if “does Rossom doing good with their research justify what they do with Dollhouse”. I think that will be as interesting if not more than FOX’s “Rossum is up to no good” version. I do enjoy the current trend on Dollhouse, but by that I mean I enjoy the mythos approach to the series. Frankly I’d rather see Joss’s original mythos play out.
Let’s recap. On firefly Joss setup all the characters in the pilot episode Serenity, thus the episode was a bit more mythos oriented. FOX threw it into storage, asked him to be more standalone, and only airred the original pilot after all the other eipsodes airred (while not airring 3). I was still living in the US at the time, found the whole series confusing and didn’t have a point until I saw that last episode.
On Dollhouse, Joss was fully ready for FOX to ask him to be more standalone. He planned for it, and Fox still want him to be more standalone. So we got episode after episode of Dolls on mission without ever really getting to know their back story. To the point fans starts to turn on Eliza Dushku, because her presence on screen reminds them of standalone after standalones, and characters in dollstates when we know nothing about them.
So, it’s hard for me to thank FOX for their contribution on the currently plotline.
Great post, Keith Z-G. Interesting trivia there on Wikipedia about Amber Benson. She’s dating the actor, Adam Busch, who played Warren, the guy who killed her character Tara on Buffy!
