mellicious: Yoda: "Post every day you will" (yoda - nablopomo)
My husband the horror fanatic is watching something about Amish hauntings - that may actually be the name of it, Amish Haunting(s?). It's kind of bizarre. I've spent some time with a couple of Amish people and I have trouble believing they'd approve of that, but who knows. (It's not like I know them spectacularly well. They just always seem pretty grounded to me.)

I finished the History of LotR #3 (which is called The War of the Rings) - these are big fat books and so every one of those I finish seems like a victory. Now I just have #4, which I've already started - it's called Sauron Defeated.

So, did I mention this already? We are about to go see Wicked again. It will be Rob's second time and my third - I suggested it because I've been watching YouTube videos about it, and I finished my re-read of the book since the last time I saw it, and I'm just sort of trying to fit all of that together in my head. (One unspoilery detail I've noticed: did other people pay attention to Elphaba's glasses? Sort of an s-curve sort of thing, I've never seen any like that before and I've worn glasses since I was eight or something. Somebody's probably got a contract to sell copies of that, how much you wanna bet?)
 
(Totally spoilers below for Wicked book vs musical vs movie + speculation. Remember too that I don't even really know anything about the musical, I've never seen it.)

(Later!)
OK, I totally enjoyed Wicked again. Something I got from the videos I watched was that (as in the book, and I guess also in the musical, according to Wikipedia) the Wizard is actually Elphaba's father - BUT the movie may have hinted at this early on by having Goldblum's voice doing the singing at the beginning as her mother's lover (just, like a line or two). I thought it did sound like him but it's hard to be sure. Rob & I both also felt like when he meets with Elphaba later, it sort of seemed like he knew that. If he actually gave her mother the green elixir then he should be pretty certain, really! Anyway, we had fun trying to figure all that out.

mellicious: "I have nothing significant to say" (in a thought bubble) (nothing significant - quote)
I bought a book while I was at work tonight - a book about the history of bookstores in the U.S. Like I don't have enough reading material already. (However, the reason I saw this in the first place is because it was on a "Best books of 2024" list, so if you're interested: The Bookshop.) I'm sure I will read it before too long but I don't know that I'll read it right away.

I posted a list yesterday with all the books I bought in 2020, as part of a project that mostly has to do with getting rid of some of my paper journals. I wasn't keeping count, but it looked like I had read more than half of them, for sure, but that's a lot of unread books. I have a list with a lot of my unread books on it, somewhere, and I try to get myself to read from that list - and I do, some of the time.

As a matter of fact, I had some trade paperbacks of The History of the Lord of the Rings - a couple of big fat volumes of them, and they were old enough that one of them fell apart while I was reading it. (I'm guessing I'd had them since shortly after the movies came out, so probably 20 years or so!) - Are y'all familiar with this series? It's Tolkien's son Christopher doing a deep, deep dive into his dad's manuscripts. It's pretty fascinating. I actually read both of those this past summer and am almost finished with the third one - there are four in all. (Three books was not enough to cover the three volumes of LotR, apparently.) And there are more volumes for his dad's other works, too - I think it was a dozen total.

So I guess I kind of had Tolkien on the brain, and I happened to notice on Black Friday and over that weekend (which seems to have just become an extension of Black Friday, I assume I'm not the only one to notice that!) that, well, the Tolkien books were on sale. I don't think it was all of them, but it happened to be concentrated on some that I didn't have - The Children of Hurin, Tales from the Perilous Realm, The Fall of Gondolin. That's what I bought. Oh, and one more volume of the History of Middle Earth (which is the full series title for the rest of those books I was talking about above). The one I got was the very last one, The Peoples of Middle-Earth. Hey, they were $1.99! (I've been happily reading about the Prologue to LotR, which for some reason is covered in that volume.)

And it's not like I had read all the Tolkien I had in the house, either. I know I have Lost Tales lurking somewhere, unread, and maybe some more. I kinda have a book-buying problem - not that that's anything new. (I'm sure a lot of y'all can sympathize.)



(But - progress in the unread department - I did finally read The Three-Body Problem this year!)

mellicious: cartoon of a "Nightmare Before Christmas" image, except with a sheep (frank the sheep)
margaritaville

(I've been re-reading Lord of the Rings lately, so this struck me as really funny.)

mellicious: Narnia witch in a carriage pulled by polar bears, captioned "OMGWTFPOLARBEAR!" (polar bear & witch - m15m)
I picked up Lord of the Rings in a Kindle edition, because it was on sale, and I thought, well, that'd be a good thing to read again over the holidays. And I read maybe the first chapter, and I thought, hmm, maybe I should read The Hobbit too while I'm at it. (I've read them both many times but not in some years.) So I went looking for my copy of it and all I could find was my very ancient paperback copy - I read it for English class in, like, 1973 or 74 - cover price $1.50. But I'm pretty sure that one would just fall apart if I tried to read it - I kept it mostly because it's got that old cover that I love. (Ooh, it's the middle one here - so '74. But I also remember that one on the left with the drawing of The Hill.) I thought I had bought a new copy, a trade paperback, at some point, but I haven't been able to find it, if I did. (I found Unfinished Tales and Lost Tales and some stuff like that that I doubt I've ever read at all. But no Hobbit.)

So I was thinking, ok, I guess I'll skip it after all, and then lo and behold, Amazon had it on sale too yesterday. (Amazon is usually utterly terrible at recommending things for me to read, especially considering they've got 20 years of my book-buying history to draw on! Or maybe they recommend it to everybody, I don't know. - Then again, if Amazon was good at that, would Goodreads even exist?)

So anyway, I got The Hobbit, Kindle edition, and I'm reading it, and, well, I'm not really into it so far. I think, for one thing, that I've practically got chunks of it memorized, especially the Unexpected Party bits at the beginning. So that's not good for reading it and having it feel fresh! And also, since I've been an adult, the hobbits being cute is not really my favorite part of these books. I'm always happier when they get the hell out of The Shire. Anyway, I'm plowing through, and they're at Rivendell, and hopefully my interest will perk up from here.

mellicious: Quote from Buffy the Vampire Slayer's 1st episode: "The earth is doomed." (SLoD - keeble)
I have been using the #hobbitses tag ever since I got home. I am easily amused. (It is not exactly highly original, there are a ton of people using it.)

So really the plan was to do normal Saturday things today, and go to see The Hobbit tomorrow, because going to movies is more of our Sunday thing. But there's also a football game tomorrow that I want to watch, and I started thinking that a three-hour football game followed by a (almost) three-hour movie would be a bit much. So I suggested to Rob that maybe we could go to the movie tonight instead, always assuming we could get in. (The funny thing is that Rob was apparently not listening to me too closely and thought I was just saying that we should go buy the tickets for tomorrrow while we were out tonight. Luckily we cleared this up before actually buying the tickets, and he seemed to go along with the change in program pretty happily once we got it straight.)

Now our normal Saturday routine (now confined to Saturdays-when-I'm-not working) goes something like this: Rob goes to the gym, I play video games, we do laundry, we go out to eat rather early to beat the crowds, we go to the grocery store after that and usually get home in time to watch Dr Who when there is one. So mostly what changed is the latter part of that. I started on a new zone in GW2 (Timberline Falls, if you want to know) and went on my usual exploring binge and forgot about the time. But around four I came to enough to start thinking about the whole 48fps thing and 3D vs 2D and all that, even though we still theoretically weren't going until tomorrow, and I got as far as looking it up at the huge Cinemark which is the closest theater to us. That was when I started reflecting on the timetable for tomorrow and that moviegoing might well fit in as well or better tonight, if I could get Rob to agree.

Before we could leave for all of this, we had to run the gauntlet of neighbors downstairs having a cookie party. We really should have gone downstairs and made an appearance earlier when it was in full swing, but the aforesaid fever of game exploration hit, and I kind of didn't get around to it. And Rob didn't push it either. But we did stop and talk to everybody for a few minutes (without actually taking any cookies, I want you to know) and then we went off to the Cinemark to buy the tickets and then went to Texas Roadhouse to eat - not really where I would've picked, but Rob likes it, so eh - and then the movie. We had plenty of time and in fact got seated in time for all the pre-movie stuff that we normally avoid by running in at the last minute. We saw a thing about that Vegas series on CBS and some Canon/Ron Howard thing that sort of mystified me, and... I forget what else. And then eventually a ton of previews, mostly for post-apocalyptic science-fictiony things that I will probably go see all of unless they seem to totally suck - let's see, one was AfterEarth with Will Smith, and then there was one with Tom Cruise that I forget the name of (Oblivion, maybe?) and then Pacific Rim. Stuck in there were a couple of non-SF things that completely failed to register. And of course there were the numerous pleas to TURN OFF YOUR CELL PHONE PLEASE and by the time the movie started, I was like, "Oh, really, this is the movie finally? Oh look, there's the New Line logo, I guess it really is."

Oh, also, there was a GW2 promo in there (along with several other video games) and something about it made a little wave of laughter go through the crowd. I totally did not get why, though. I'm not sure if it was a GW2-is-already-over laugh - because this is The Hobbit, after all, it's bound to be a geekier-than-average crowd - or what that was about. (If GW2 is already over, then they should have laughed even harder at the Mists of Pandaria one, you'd think!)

Anyway. The movie. I went in with fairly low expectations, and I'm sure that helped, but I enjoyed it a lot. It was certainly all over the place tonally, with the whipsawing back and forth between low comedy and I'm-Thorin-and-I'm-hot dramatic slo-mo and bits of The Silmarillion, for god's sake, but mostly I didn't even mind. Rob liked it too. (We sat through a good hunk of credits before we got up, and then went to the restroom and got out to the car, and Rob said, "I bet the credits are still running." And this being a Peter Jackson movie, he might well have been right.)

Oh, also I should note for the record that we went to see plain-vanilla Digital 2D, although I had to explain the whole framerate thing to Rob before we could buy the tickets. I think there were at least 4 different format choices, and the showing we went to was not even sold out, although it was one of the larger theaters and it was hardly empty. I did not even notice where the 3D was supposed to be like I usually do, for what that's worth.
mellicious: Quote from Buffy the Vampire Slayer's 1st episode: "The earth is doomed." (SLoD - big sword)
I took the medical terminology test on skin and made a 100. Yay, me.

Col and I spent most of the day trying out Lord of the Rings Online - aka LOTRO. There has been a bit of drama about this: Col has been playing for a couple of weeks here and there, and he was apparently rather perplexed when I said something to the effect of, "But I've always wanted to play that! How could you start without me?" Considering how long we've been friends and how much time we spend talking, we sometimes manage not to know each other very well. He seems to have completely overlooked my Tolkien-geek side. (Although I hear that [livejournal.com profile] nonelvis  was aware of it!)More drama & dithering )

(I should probably get back to the studying, shouldn't I?)



(In case anybody is wondering what the hell that icon is, it's Cleolinda's Secret Life of Dolls, which is the closest thing to a Tolkien icon I seem to have at the moment.) (I swear I used to have one that said "Still Not King." I probably deleted it because I wasn't using it much, but I would like to have it back, darnit.)

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