Fizzzzle

That's one thing that will happen during the show - the Nazgul don't exist yet, and they will by the end. Or at least they should.

I saw one tinfoil theory that Halbrand ends up becoming the Witch King. I could be down for that.

That could be true, though my theory is that we haven't seen Sauron yet. Unless he's the Stranger.

Get ready for a couple years of "why are Democrat Senators being obstructionists?! We need to work across the aisle!"

I'm 32. I may have just missed it

I have no idea who that is and don't care.

That's something that really bugs me about the people complaining about how it's not faithful to the source material. Despite the fact that I think whether it's faithful or not is debatable, what if that part of the source material is just kind of fucked and we... shouldn't do it? Maybe we have just reached a point where a story that takes place in a FANTASY WORLD THAT DOESN'T EXIST IN REALITY shouldn't have all the good guys be white and all the bad guys be non-white or Orcs? And that's not to reflect on Tolkien's work at all, no one is saying that his work is implicitly racist****, but we do have to acknowledge the times we live in, and the fact that action movies/TV have been the purview of white males and their power fantasies for basically... forever. Okay, so it might break a little bit of lore. But keeping that part of lore could be even worse. **** I know I've gone on this rant before, so I'll leave it in spoilers, but it has to do with implicit/explicit character definition in Tolkien's works Here's the thing. It's a work of fiction. It's a work of art. Once a work of art is released into the world, the world owns it, and it will morph and change with the times. Again, no one is saying that Tolkien's original work was racist, implicitly or explicitly (well, maybe some people do, but they're reaching for things to be mad about and you should ignore them). However, art does not exist in a vacuum, it exists in our real world. Tolkien wrote his stories in the early 20th century, and the world has changed a lot since then. The Cold War, the Vietnam War, the Afghan Wars, the end of traditional colonization, the War on Terror - these are all things that happened after Tolkien published Lord of the Rings, and we can't just ignore that. The fact is there are millions of people who live in Britain now who are people of color, and a lot of those people live there BECAUSE of British colonization in places like Jamaica, South Asia, Malaysia, and Africa. Doesn't it seem, just a little bit, that saying "All of the good guys have to be white" in a fantasy world that is loosely based on an idea of Britain is like... maybe... maybe... maybe... maybe... just a teensy bit racist?

I've heard War Horse is pretty good, but I've never seen it. I'm willing to bet it's very emotional, but.... (again, having never seen it), it's also PG-13. Any film attempting to depict the brutality of war should never be rated anything other than R. That's why Glory is the best Civil War movie. A dude gets fucking brained in like the opening seconds of the first battle scene, as if to say "this isn't your daddy's re-enactment fantasy, Timmy. Sit down and get ready for some real shit." I've gone on enough tangents about Civil War movies on this board, though. They Shall Not Grow Old is fantastic. I remember seeing a making-of video about it somewhere, and the technology they used/invented to make that movie is really something.

I don't think it really makes sense for the Stranger to be Sauron, but we'll see. His magic definitely seems to be evil, in my opinion. The fire he controls isn't hot, the way he controls the fireflies results in all of them dying

This looks REALLY fucking good. We don't get very many WWI movies compared to WWII in general, but even less so movies that delve deep into the darkness of war. 1917 did a little bit, and Legends of the Fall (though only partially a WWI movie, and honestly not that great) delves a bit into PTSD, we generally don't get a lot of dirt and grime when it comes to The Great War.

I'm staying in Portland for a little while right now and I was working a wedding tonight. This one guy was standing in front of the bar talking about how he owns 4 properties and rents 3 of them out as airbnbs (bragging that they're only occupied like a week out of any given month, but it's still better than having tenants), and then saying to the guy he was talking to that he should charge his roommates more for rent to maximize profits. I wanted to blow my brains out.

Nothing to see here

One thing that the US has over most other countries is cuisine variety. I've traveled a lot, and any time I've found myself in a country for longer than a few weeks, I've found myself getting sick of the food. Sure, you can find Italian food in Japan, but you have to seek it out. In the US (and Canada), if you're in any decently sized city, you can just walk down the street and find Thai food, Italian food, Mexican food, Indian food, etc. The one time I ate pizza every day was after I spent like six months in Japan. When I got home, all I wanted was pizza. I think it's because the main ingredients of pizza (bread, tomato, and cheese) are things that are very rare in Japan. When I got home, that's all I wanted.

Oh, they haven't mentioned it in the show at all. It's an obscure bit of lore about the specific clan of Dwarves that live in Moria (the Longbeards). The clan was founded by Durin, and their tradition holds that Durin gets reincarnated every so often in the royal line, up until Durin VII, who is supposed to be the last one. So basically there can't be two Durins at once.

I believe in the show Durin's father (the old King) is Durin III.

I used to think it was pizza, but I have actually tried that at a few different points, and it did get old. I'm kind of thinking for me that it's something like spam and rice. or I could probably eat a Yoshinoya beef bowl any day. It's pure sustenance.

I'm growing to like the show a lot. I still think the first episodes was a terrible way to start off a series, though.

I saw the video of Hawkins' son playing drums for 'My Hero.' I teared up a bit.

I think that adaptations should do whatever they want as long as it doesn't contradict the lore, because that's when you run into problems. So far, the show has taken plenty of liberties, and they've merged certain things, but the only way they've outright contradicted lore has been little nitpicky things that don't actually matter to this particular story. Like not letting Elrond attend Gil-Galad's council because he's "not a lord," when it's like "dude, Elrond's father literally saved the world from Morgoth before basically ascending to godhood and his mother was a quarter-Goddess, if he's not a Lord of Elves, who the fuck is?!" Or having two Durins be alive at the same time, when the Dwarves believe that each Durin is a reincarnation of Durin the Deathless, so there literally can't be two Durins alive at the same time. Guess what.... none of that shit matters to this particular story. Elrond's parents aren't in this story. The prophecy of Durin does not play into this story. If that's all the lore that is getting broken, no one cares.

My last landlord tried to do similar shit with me. They said I owed them $2k. Look through your lease agreement. Unless they have an "insufficient notice fee" in writing in that agreement which you signed when you moved there, you don't owe them shit. I had to break the lease at my last place and my landlord came after me for an early termination fee. I notified them that nowhere in the lease agreement does it say anything about an early termination fee, let alone specifics on what that fee would be (you owe us [x]% of rent for every month left on the lease or whatever), so... suck it. Take me to court if you want. Whoever wrote your lease agreement done fucked up if they forgot to put that part in the contract, but it's not my problem.

ALSO ALSO, you'll see a lot of people complain about how Galadriel isn't "how Tolkien described her." Tolkien said very little of Galadriel before the third age. Like, literally only a few sentences. So that's kind of bullshit from a lore perspective. But also, from a storytelling perspective, what do you have when a main character of your story ends in the exact place they begin? That's right, a shitty fucking story. I have no doubt that Galadriel will end in a place more reminiscent of how she appears in the movies. Same with Elrond. "bUt GaLaDrIeL iSn'T BrAsH" - bro, she might have been at some point. Lord of the Rings takes place like... 5,000 years after the start of the show? Canonically, anyway, they're compressing the timeline a lot.

fore runners to them. They never outright say Smeagol was a Hobbit, they say "he was not so different from a Hobbit" or whatever. You can think of them as basically the same, though.

I got sick of telling people that the only "destroyed" place in Portland was a small area of downtown - an area that basically fell into a sharp decline anyway at the beginning of the pandemic because without people working in offices, there's basically nothing there.

"people are lazy and don't want to work."

Also, can we talk about how fucking sick the Orc designs are? They look fucking scary. And I love how they're incorporating more of how Orcs can't move in sunlight. The movies got around this by just basically only showing Orcs at night (except for the Uruk-Hai, who can move during the day)