BF2S Forums The Dead Pool

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/01/us/s … rdose.html

even the kennedy’s are dropping to opiate abuse. sad.

RIP Christopher Tolkien, 95

I'm not very familiar with his personality or public interactions. But I do remember this bit:

Christopher Tolkien to New Line: The Hobbit is Mine!
https://filmschoolrejects.com/christoph … t-is-mine/

i mean, tolkien was a bad writer and an old pedant, but at least he came up with something.

his son seemed to inherit the pedantry and dryness of personality but without any of the talent.

there's a certain type of literary executor that publishers, academics, producers, etc. all abhor: and he was one of them. just squatting on the intellectual property, adding nothing of value, and generally being a sod. james joyce's and dickens' estate are, or have been, in similarly miserable hands.

Last edited by uziq (2020-01-17 07:12:17)

"RANT: The Silmarillion is not "dry"!!" -via reddit
https://www.reddit.com/r/tolkienfans/co … is_not_dry

"Got a negative opinion of any of the material? Scandalous!" -LotR community

Perfect example:

It's dry if you have the reading attention-span of a kid - who wouldn't necessarily be able to judge artistic merit in the first place. This isn't racking on anyone who doesn't like Silmarillion […]

Sure it isn't belittling anyone who doesn't like it. It's just calling them out for "low attention spans" and the inability to judge artistic merit. wth

So are anti-fandoms.

haha what?

i don't make my identity about hip hop. I don't see it as hypocritical that I am a huge homer sports fan, because i'm not making my life about it. I don't live and die by what some sportswriter says about my team, or follow athletes on twitter. I'm not writing 1500 word medium articles on how bobafett's mandalorian armor should actually be a different shade of mauve because that's how it originally appeared 40 years ago.

There's nothing wrong with enjoying something - people should be happy to support something that gives them joy. But realize the creators, the athletes, the actors, the writers don't owe you as a fan anything.

@dilbert: yeah, whatever. Antifandom...lol

That doesn't really make him a part of an anti-fandom. Cats isn't the most critically loved stage production to begin with, and the bizarre design choices mentioned in that thread speak for themselves.

If they were going CGI, they should have just made them cats. Not like Lion King remake, more like a Dreamworks thing or something. Instead, we have you and macbeth drooling over furries.

Dilbert_X wrote:

Have you seen it?

I don't have to. It's like with Ghostbusters 2016. I can make an educated guess.

KEN-JENNINGS wrote:

haha what?

i don't make my identity about hip hop. I don't see it as hypocritical that I am a huge homer sports fan, because i'm not making my life about it. I don't live and die by what some sportswriter says about my team, or follow athletes on twitter. I'm not writing 1500 word medium articles on how bobafett's mandalorian armor should actually be a different shade of mauve because that's how it originally appeared 40 years ago.

There's nothing wrong with enjoying something - people should be happy to support something that gives them joy. But realize the creators, the athletes, the actors, the writers don't owe you as a fan anything.

@dilbert: yeah, whatever. Antifandom...lol

Team sports has to be the dumbest shit you can follow. My opinion of anyone drops a little when they start talking about sports. I'm sure the part of my brain that would have been devoted to sports is instead occupied by something frivolous too like Magic the Gathering but at least that is constantly changing and evolving. Why would anyone want to watch people try to get a ball into a tall hole for 1000 hours of their life?

But you haven't seen the actual film.

I just find it remarkable how many people jump on the various anti-bandwagons for no coherent reason.

Dilbert_X wrote:

Why was Tolkien a 'bad writer'?

" james joyce's and dickens' estate are, or have been, in similarly miserable hands." Good, I haven't read any Joyce but apparently its also shit.

those are not controversial opinions. tolkien's writing is very dry, flat, and endlessly descriptive. he was not a novelist by trade, he was an etymologist/linguist of old english/norse, what in the 19th century would have been termed grandly a 'philologist'. his world building is done with a metric tonnage of words, words, words. his sentences do not vary. his characters all talk in the same voice. his plots/arcs and dramatic conceits are all just taken from old norse sagas or epics. the only difference being, of course, the technical differences of the many imagined languages he came up with. but putting 4 new languages and alphabets, alien to the reader, into a book isn't literature, it's an autistic brain dump, a tweedy oxford don depositing the contents of his study or writing desk's top-right drawer onto the page.

tolkien was criticised for his style then, he was criticised during the 'boom' of popular fantasy writing in the 1970s and 1980s, he was criticised by sci-fi writers and cyberpunks, etc. read a page of william gibson's 'neuromancer' and a page from 'the Silmarillion' and tell me who is the more engaging and exciting stylist (somehow i doubt you've read either). here's how a writer interested in language opens a novel: 'The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.'. here's how tolkien opens: 'There was Eru, the One, who in Arda is called lluvatar; and he made first the Ainur, the Holy Ones, that were the offspring of his thought ...' even with the intentionally old testament genesis vibe, this shit continues for about THIRTY pages. all of these entirely made-up names are no doubt interesting for their etymological roots, and i'm sure 'Eru' means something in sanskrit that would warm an erudite oxford prof's cheeks with recognition, but good writing it is emphatically not.

not to mention the fact that he gave to fantasy a cast-iron conservatism, everything determined, like his close associate c.s. lewis, by some predetermined view of the world that was hardly imaginative and more a re-dressing of some very old ideas (pastoral-sentimental pre-ww1 guff about england in tolkien, high-anglican god toss with lewis).

but can you really say you've read 1,100 pages of lord of the rings and enjoyed it? that it jumped off the page? that you sat in an armchair in a state of rapt attention, wondering just what was over that 135th escarpment awaiting your plucky fellowship?

btw joyce's estate was controlled in a different way, in that his grandson controlled strictly what was permissible research and what topics constituted libel. it's certainly never hindered the publication of his books. they are all (justly) celebrated as some of the best works of the 20th century.

Last edited by uziq (2020-01-18 00:20:35)

Dilbert_X wrote:

There are plenty of anti-fandoms, hating on things which don't matter for no coherent reason.

So far Uzique has written 925 words critiquing a film he hasn't seen, for example.

i don't hate on Cats, that implies that i actually give a damn either way. the original poems hardly stir my interest, and they're by a poet i revere. the musical has never caused me any thought or consternation. the film certainly hasn't. it's just a ludicrous concept for a franchise/adaptation of any kind. no surprises that i know i won't like a bunch of famous celebrities thrown together in a CGI blender to recite nonsense poems.

an 'anti-fandom'? i type at like 200 wpm. a few paragraphs on why cats is a ridiculous premise does not constitute an anti-fandom. stop being so butthurt all your life. i'm sure the critical reception of the film and its box office performance are all senseless, 'incoherent' phenomena.

Last edited by uziq (2020-01-18 00:35:49)