K-Squared Ramblings

Hobbit Settlement

Yay! The Tolkien Trust approves New Line’s Hobbit movie! #

New Line has settled a legal dispute with the author’s heirs over Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings movies, clearing the way for Guillermo Del Toro to develop the Hobbit film.

Gandledorf

Go ahead. Tell me Dumbledore doesn’t look like Gandalf in this poster.

Waitaminute

Listening to “Into the West” (end credits song from Lord of the Rings: Return of the King). Lyric, “Across the sea a pale moon rises.”

It’s all about crossing the sea into the west to go to elf heaven. Presumably the speaker is standing at the Grey Havens, waiting for the ships to arrive and carry her off to the Undying Lands, looking across the sea…to the west.

So since when does the moon rise in the west?

Admittedly, it’s a fantasy setting, but Middle Earth is set up to be a mythical past for the real world, so I’m fairly certain the sun and moon still rise in the east…

OC D&D

Something like 10 years ago, Katie saw a self-storage place in which the opening S was unlit, making it read, “Elf Storage.” She’s been looking for another one ever since, and we finally caught one in Newport Beach a few months ago. This one was even better, because the S had actually fallen off.

Of course, there are other things in the area that could easily come out of a Dungeons & Dragons manual. Such as this Kobold Construction truck.

And then there’s the fact that all fire engines in Orange County are labeled ORC.

Let’s not forget the previously-blogged Hobbit Center in Laguna Beach.

And that’s not even getting into all the Tolkien-inspired street names in Lake Forest…

Rambling On

On the subject of filk, and trying to define it, there’s a whole subset of songs by professional musicians that just rides the edge. (Half of “Weird Al” Yankovic’s repertoire, for instance.) Twice in the last week I’ve heard Led Zeppelin’s “Ramble On,” which is apparently about Aragorn and Arwen from Lord of the Rings. It even makes references to Mordor and Gollum in the lyrics.

I’m not sure I’d ever heard it before, but Train covered it at the concert we went to last Friday (we went for the Wallflowers, who played after the intermission), and I just heard it on the radio this morning.

Talk about timing.

From DM of the Rings to Chainmail Bikini

After a year, DM of the Rings is finished. The comic recast Lord of the Rings as a Dungeons & Dragons campaign, using stills (sometimes brilliantly chosen) from the Peter Jackson–directed movie trilogy in a comic-strip format.

The series poked fun at RPG tropes and player types, with the players’ dialog given to the LOTR characters. Every once in a while, someone would speak in character. But mostly, they’d be asking about the Cheetos, or why there wasn’t enough loot. And speaking of loot, it also pointed out where the story would fall down as a game.

Anyway, cartoonist Shamus Young has already started his next project, this time with artist Shawn Gaston: The webcomic Chainmail Bikini: The Nightmare Legend of Deuce Baaj started today. From the first strip, it looks to be covering the same territory—foibles of role-playing games—this time explored through an original story. It’s not clear where the title comes in, though.

Update Dec. 2008: Chainmail Bikini ended in May 2008, and seems to have been taken down. Sorry to all of the people looking for it and landing on this page.

Con Sundae

Sunday was, oddly, more crowded than Saturday. Maybe it was the desperation of the last day combined with the fact that it was still on the weekend. We got in later, closer to 11:30, since we spent the morning packing.

I did a final round of back-issue hunting, and ended up not buying anything. All the Golden Age Flash books were high-grade, and therefore out of my price range. Unfortunately I forgot to check eBay this morning, because several auctions I’d put off bidding on ended before we got home.

I hit two panels: First Fables, which was basically the entire creative team of the book and the spinoff, Jack of Fables, and was great fun. They also announced the upcoming “burning questions” issue. They’ll take questions from readers, and put together a bunch of one– or two-page stories to answer them.

The other panel was for Lord of the Rings. People from New Line Home Video, EA Games, Games Workshop, and Topps Cards all talked about their new tie-ins. At least, they did after the 15-minute attempt to get the screen properly hooked up to both the DVD player and the laptop. I’m annoyed that they’re releasing another DVD edition (this set has the theatrical version and the extended version on one double-sided disc—no, they’re not making more changes to the films, thank the Eldar), but the Battle for Middle Earth II expansion pack, Rise of the Witch-King, looks pretty cool. Too bad I’m not any good at real-time strategy games.

We left the con around 4:00, had dinner back in Little Italy, then got on the road around a quarter to six. 2½ hours later, we were home.

It’s odd how quickly you get used to the walking. After the first day, my feet were sore from walking and my shoulders were sore from carrying my backpack. They were still bad the next morning, but better by evening, and by the third day, they were perfectly fine. (Well, except for the blister on my toe.)

Still, I think I’m going to be a zombie at work tomorrow. Next year, it might be worth taking the following Monday off as well.

Anyway, stay tuned. I’ll be posting photos (cosplay, weirdness, and possibly sightseeing)—and with any luck, quotes as well—sometime in the next few days.

One Time-Turner to rule them all

I keep calendars displaying both the current month and the next month up in my cube at work. I figured I’d better post this configuration before it stopped being what I got to look at every day:

Viking Catering

Here’s an interesting storefront window:

Just what kind of food would vikings serve? Mead, I suppose. Probably with “roaring fires, malt beer, [and] red meat off the bone!”

News from Comic Con

Ah, Comic Con! The show doesn’t seem much bigger than last year (and they’ve already filled the convention center floor), but there are more people. Last year, Friday was quite comfortable, but this year it was more crowded than I remember.

Let’s see… News from panels so far. Serenity and Mirrormask are apparently opening the same weekend (September 30), so I’ll be spending an entire day at the movies. Sergio Aragones and Mark Evanier are working on a script for a CGI Groo the Wanderer film. They apparently held out for years for a deal that gave them enough creative control to satisfy them. And early next year they expect to release the 4-part comic book, Groo vs. Conan.

The Jim Henson Co. 50^th anniversary panel was great fun. In addition to seeing some early experimental muppetry, we learned that they will be producing a sequel to The Dark Crystal that takes place several hundred years later, and a prequel anime series.

Katie went to the big Warner Bros. movie panel, featuring Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, V For Vendetta, The Fountain (from Darren Arenofsky), and The Corpse Bride, all of which look promising.

And if you have a chance while in San Diego, don’t miss Fellowship!, a musical parody of The Fellowship of the Ring. With the exception of one running gag that got old very fast, it was a great send-up of the movie (and it was also fun looking for tropes and in-jokes from musicals).

This year is absolutely crawling with Jedi costumes. So many that we didn’t bother to take pictures, except for one Anakin & Obi-Wan pair where the former actually looked like Anakin. There’s also a booth selling high-quality light sabres with removable, light-up blades that are sturdy enough you can duel with them. The cheap ones run for $120.

Gondor Found!

After four drive-bys, I finally managed to get a picture of the Gondor street sign. It was far enough away that it’s barely readable (this is the native resolution on a 5 megapixel image — it’s not shrunk, it’s just cropped). Eventually I ought to turn onto a side street, park the car, and walk to a nice vantage point instead of just holding the camera with one hand while zooming by and hoping I get an image.

I’ve updated Living in Middle Earth.

Living in Middle Earth

A few years ago I lived in the city of Lake Forest (formerly El Toro) for a bit. One of the interesting things about Lake Forest is its collection of streets named after characters and places in Lord of the Rings. (And yes, these were around long before the movies were made.)

I still drive past Gondor Drive on my way back from the comic store, and I’ve been meaning to get a picture of the street sign for a while. It turned out to be too hard to shoot without actually aiming, so I turned onto a smaller street where I knew I could catch Elrond Lane:

Other Tolkien-inspired streets include: Buckland Lane, Bywater Road (and it is at least near water), Rivendell Drive, Shadowfax Drive and Brandywine Lane.

While checking the Thomas Guide for some of the ones I missed, I just discovered a neighborhood with Sesame Street, Muppet Lane, Big Bird, Oscar, Grover, and Cookie Monster. And Kurmit [sic], though I suppose that could be a typo.

And then there’s Dana Point, which has the Street of the Green Lantern. Of course, it has about 20 named Street of the fill-in-the-blank Lantern — Blue, Amber, Golden, Silver, Violet, etc.

Update Sep. 24: Here’s a blurry picture of the Gondor street sign:

Hobbit Center

On our way out of Laguna Beach, we ended up on a side street parallelling PCH. Fortunately, we spotted this gem of a corner shopping center:

Now, the nearby city of Lake Forest has had Tolkien-named streets for years (Gondor, Elrond, and others), and of course UCI has its Middle Earth dorm complex. I have no idea how long this one has been there, but it’s interesting to think that we never would have found it if we’d been able to make a left turn out of the hotel parking lot!

LOTR caption madness

For those of you who haven’t seen these yet:

Feel free to copy and distribute/re-post these so long as I get the credit.

An interesting proposal from the folks at the IMDb

Now I can’t get “The Scotsman” out of my head.