>> ^Ti_Moth:

>> ^smooman:
ps: valhalla isnt viking heaven (or hell)
its more closely compared to a kind of purgatory
........but whatever

Damn! My lack of knowledge on norse mythology lets me down once again : P . Beleive me when I say I don't think you lack critical thinking skills but surely you must agree that a suspension of critical thinking is required to make that leap of faith to believe any particular religion. That is the one of the main reason why I can't pitch my tent in the camp of any religion. ( I'm a polytheistic agnostic by the way seems like the safest bet).


not necessarily. I know ive been name dropping him a lot but, CS Lewis more or less reasoned himself into believing in god as did Tolkien i believe (not sure about the latter). he wrote a book about it i believe but i'd have to check

same is true of the Tolkien series.

After reading the Hobbit at age 10, I felt ready to read Carroll's Alice in Wonderland and after that, well, why not Melville?

>> ^Sagemind:

Not great comedy - but there is a point in there - Harry Potter is just that - a stepping stone to greater literature. Sure Harry Potter books introduced kids who never picked up a book before into the world of literature. (But) How many people people stepped down from a world of literature to read Harry Potter?
There are So many great books out there and kids everywhere just keep re-reading the same Harry Potter books or Twilight books and are stunted from ever moving on. My daughter has read the HP books a few times and the Twilight books perhaps 5-6 times each.
Move on already..., My daughter just finished reading The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy now so I'm hoping to get her moving on to other stuff - Many never will read another book series ...

I think this is true simply because of the way that our minds work, except that description has a double linkage. First, even the most original creator or developer of something is going to at least subconsciously reference other things that they have experienced or been exposed to, because our minds search for context inside of our own past.

And second, and perhaps more interestingly, our minds are going to see links between the new and the old and assume (correctly or not) that the new thing was clearly inspired by the old thing. Sometimes (many times) that may actually be correct, but we can easily be overestimating or inferring a connection that doesn't really exist because our brains are always looking for context and ways to pigeonhole things.

I don't really see any of this as anything to apologize for; even in the cases of the basest examples of regurgitated material. And in some cases, an homage that less than 1% of an audience will even pick up on (say perhaps the whistled tune in Kill Bill -- I certainly didn't get the reference) can be a very cool addition.

Tolkien has always struck me as having had an amazing creative mind. He drew from various mythologies, referenced a great many sources, but made an entire world with a history, population, and major events all in his own imagination. Of particular amazement to me is that a large percentage of what he created was just backstory, which he apparently never particularly intended for consumption by a larger audience (The Silmarillion for example).

>> ^theali:

All the ideas and tone in the trailer were taken from Ghost in Shell, not impressed at all.


I'm a huge Ghost in the Shell fan, both the original movie and the series. (I also hate most anime.) But, seriously...does GitS have a monopoly on the concept of people becoming cyborgs? I mean, the themes in this trailer aren't even that similar to ghost in the shell. This trailer's all about corporations vs. the people, sweeping change in culture, etc. GitS was sort of beyond that stage for Japan...when people were more used to this stuff being around, and it was more about mind vs. biology/technology.

Anyway, people borrow heavily from other people's crap all the time. They had a story on NPR the other day about this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Der_Ring_des_Nibelungen

It was all about how Marvel comics borrowed heavily from it, people argue Tolkien borrowed from it (there's even a section about Toliken/Wagner in that wikipedia article.

TL;DR version: IP does not mean "nobody can ever make another creative work about this concept ever again".

AVATAR uses classic epic plotlines that have been used for centuries from homer to proust to tolkien.the movie is pretty immersive and does this quite quickly,so it should not be that surprising that there is a pinch of sadness when the story is over.like any good book that sucks you in we all get that sadness that the ride is over.

what IS surprising is that this sadness has been prolonged in some people.i suspect this may stem from the western worlds general disconnect with what is real and what they are told is normal.all our lives we are told we are special and unique and if we work hard and study hard we can achieve great success.most of us by our mid twenties figure out this is utter bullshit but some do not and when they are shown something that gives them a stark contrast,something in which they can compare their colorless life to....they become confused,scared and i gather...depressed.

so maybe it may seem odd that it took an animated movie to begin this process of evaluation but im glad SOMETHING got these people to do that.they will get over it and will be better for it in the long run.

"you are NOT a beautiful and unique snowflake.you are the same decaying organic matter as the rest of us.we are the singing,dancing crap of the world"-dust brothers

He should now go play and review the PC edition because frankly it is an entirely different game. And going evil doesn't actually change anything in the game? Did he never play evil? Because it can create some massive differences.

In the end he gave it a good review, even if 90% of the review was about how much like every other tolkien-esque RPG out there, which is is. The game does not try to innovate very much and sticks to typical fantasy cliche's in a big way. But what it doesn't do for innovation it does for everything else. It's beyond the best RPG to come out since BG2 and is far better than anything else they have done, including KotOR.

I don't think the fact that the learning curve in Eve is harder than Wow's explains why it has more subscribers, I mean, I doubt many of the WoW players have even tried Eve. I think it's mainly because of the massive amount of money that Blizzard put behind Wow. The people who made Eve; CCP, have one product, and that's Eve, and they publish it themselves now. That's explains why Wow has more subscribers.

Personally I try most MMO's and whilst I'm interested in spaceships, whacking things as a mythical creature is more appealing for some reason. Maybe's its because I read Tolkien's books before I read the Hitch hiker's guide to the galaxy.

Oh hai sorry to lapse and comment on everything but things actually sort of about me.

im a dude sorry i know the name is a girl .. god... from tolkien. chose it randomly when i made my first eq character.

Please Support THIS POST:

http://www.videosift.com/video/CNN-Video-Of-Neda-Before-She-Was-Killed-In-Iranian-Protest

add your informational links to it maybe skip the opinions and leave them in talk.. just to keep it condensed and useful?

also .. since no one can assure anyone of anyone's intentions... can't we let people decide for themselves and suffer the consequences if they are careless or heartless... because they'll get theirs someday...right? truly, anyone would be so lucky as to read all the debates on this site...even if their initial intention was to be entertained... i know thats what happened to me.

I vote that imstellar was the first as he posted the LINK in his TALK post like a good boy... nearly 4 days ago as of today june 24... and after i submitted "my" movie i clicked his link and found it was the same. So if anyone deserves the sift in this case... it would be him... that is, if it's determined it should be a sift and that i should be the one... i pass the buck here and now!!! better late than never. sorry. make him take it since he brought it up.. or add ALL the info into a new, MEGA post... kinda trending that way. lets make it nice and concise with lots of links to opinions minus the opinions themselves.

this is an extraordinary case that will take a little bit of time to sort out appropriately but there are my belated ideas.

Hahaha. Mr. Bailey just had to throw in a Tolkien reference, eh?

"I object to the idea that people have the right to vote on everything...." (Rand)

Good point. She may have meant that the stupid majority, say kooky Christians against gay marriages, should not abuse their greater numbers against the lesser.

I don't think that's what she had in mind, but....

"I am for the separation of state and economics...just as we had the separation of state and churches....” (Rand)

Another good point, except that neither has ever really happened, ever, in mankind's history.

It has been possible to separate religion from government, but not economics; one is always a subset of the other.

Brilliant woman. Totally fucked up by the trauma of the Russian revolution. Confined herself to a fantasy world, as brilliant as Tolkien's, as spiritual as C.S. Lewis's, as curious as Lewis Carroll's....

But a far cry away from reality.

Tao Te Ching - Lao Tzu
The Hobbit - J. R. R. Tolkien
Dune - Frank Herbert
Gödel, Escher, Bach - Douglas Hofstadter
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich - Alexander Solzhenitsyn
Galapagos - Kurt Vonnegut
Live from Golgotha - Gore Vidal
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest - Ken Kesey
Siddhartha - Herman Hesse
Catch-22 - Joseph Heller


Those are 10 off the top of my head, in no particular order. Some I consider favorites, others made a strong enough impression that they always come to mind when someone asks a question like this.

I don't want to compare the films, but you run into the same situation with The Lord of The Rings. A devoted fanbase that has read the literature and an audience who has no understanding of it other than the films. There are many people upset that the movies changed major things and left characters out etc .. and than there are those that are glad because it exposed Tolkien's works to a new generation. No question book sales for LOTR skyrocketed after the movies' release. I don't know what point I'm making except that sometimes movies that (from a fans perspective) shit on the books they came from .. actually help those books and expand the number of people who read them.

Tags for this video have been changed from 'Owyn, Witch, King, Lord, Rings, Tollkein' to 'Owyn, Witch, King, Lord, Rings, Tolkien' - edited by xxovercastxx

Yeah, the Dragonlance series is amazing. I have no patience for Lord of Rings, at least in book form, though.

In reply to this comment by Zifnab:
Well I'll give it a go. In no particular order:

1. Dragonlance Chronicles - Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman. This is the series that really got me hooked on reading way back in high school and I still really enjoy it today.

2. Wheel of Time - RIP Robert Jordan. Brandon Sanderson is going to complete the final book (A Memory of Light) for RJ as the novel was incomplete at the time of his death.

3. Stranger in a Strange Land - Robert A. Heinlein. Along with most of Heinlein's other work.

4. Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling.

5. The Lord of the Rings - J.R.R. Tolkien.

Plus many more, as you can see I'm an avid reader of fantasy. I also really enjoy A Song of Ice and Fire by George R. R. Martin, The Sword of Truth by Terry Goodkind, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams, The Chronicles of Amber by Roger Zelazny, and some other's that I can't think of at the moment...

Well I'll give it a go. In no particular order:

1. Dragonlance Chronicles - Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman. This is the series that really got me hooked on reading way back in high school and I still really enjoy it today.

2. Wheel of Time - RIP Robert Jordan. Brandon Sanderson is going to complete the final book (A Memory of Light) for RJ as the novel was incomplete at the time of his death.

3. Stranger in a Strange Land - Robert A. Heinlein. Along with most of Heinlein's other work.

4. Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling.

5. The Lord of the Rings - J.R.R. Tolkien.

Plus many more, as you can see I'm an avid reader of fantasy. I also really enjoy A Song of Ice and Fire by George R. R. Martin, The Sword of Truth by Terry Goodkind, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams, The Chronicles of Amber by Roger Zelazny, and some other's that I can't think of at the moment...