Absolutely!! In the last years I’ve reread Beowulf and the Art Of War, and read Gilgamesh, The Water Margin/Heroes of the Marsh, a half dozen good books on Japanese tattoos, 2312, Artemis, two books of Viking mythology, and 3 books of Japanese horror/mythology….I would recommend all….so clearly they’re bad.

>> ^JiggaJonson:

The fact that they can render CGI this beautiful in real time makes me want to throw up when I think about all of the generic/cartoony CGI movies out there.
I know we've come a long way, but even shudder Star Wars has fallen victim to horrid CGI. Give me a puppet any day over something that looks like a cartoon.


I couldn't disagree more. By that logic, Beowulf is a better looking film than The Incredibles, which I think we both know is absurd.

dry, boring, and flat-out hard to read (e.g. three names for every individual, all sounding so similar as to be virtually impossible to differentiate)

Reading is all in the eye of the beholder, so I won't say you're WRONG but I will say you are looking at them with an incorrect expectation (were then, and still are).

DRY & BORING: Tolkien wrote the book with a 'high' style. He makes no apologies for it. He did not write the novel in such a way as to please the varying sensibilities of people. Some people today want 'grit', others want speed, or breathless action, or any one a hundred different tastes. If you read the books and want those other things, then your experience will be lacking.

HARD TO READ: Tolkien was a professor of philology, and wrote accordingly. Like Wells, Lewis, and others of his stripe - he did not pull his linguistic punches (much). As far as the names are concerned, you just have to deal with that because he was using the same time-honored literary device as was used in Beowulf where the recitation of a person's many names/titles is done with a reverence akin to reciting one's lineage and history. He doesn't do it to be redundant or repetitive. He does it for a reason - to tell you the person's story.

I've had this conversation with many. Not everyone likes Tolkien, and that's fine. But I dispute the statement that his work was boring, hard to read, or dry. JRR was a craftsman of the language the like of which simply does not exist today. That isn't idle brag. He had a skillset that has been lost to us. No one exists that can do what he did. Many try to ape his style, but they come off as pale shadows. And not only was he a master of the language in a technical sense, but he was also highly skilled at writing as well. You only get that combination once in a thousand years.

When you read - you have to look at the beauty of the language, the power of the words, and the light and depth of the setting & themes. There are passages and words in LOTR that never fail to send chills through me from top to bottom. I have not found any modern writer who comes close to that. Yes, I've read many who told excellent stories, or could write great characters, or who could generate good atmosphere, or good settings, et al. But none have used language so powerfully or with such light in such a way as to move the soul. LOTR is a work in which there is a true 'aura' beyond the typical book trance from other works. Again, if you go in looking for something else then, brother, you're just looking at it the wrong way.

Beowulf was from Sweden. Apparently Swedes are good at scaring away scary things.

r10k, I studied the Bible with a respected religious man; one of the few Americans allowed to view and help decipher the Dead Sea Scrolls. We used an annotated version of the Bible that explained the puns, double meanings and other linguistic aspects that would be lost on someone who just picked up a King James at Barnes & Noble. My Prof. provided context, historical and cultural. He showed us more ancient Mesopotamian mythology that contained stories remarkably similar to those in the Bible. He, a religious man (Jewish), presented the book for what it was, with no apologies or attempts to shield us from the books' many contradictions and logical inconsistencies. Warts and all.

I seem to meet all your criteria for being able to have an opinion on the Bible. I've got context, depth and the instruction of a very wise religious scholar. No offense, but I probably understand this book better than you ever will, and yet....

My critical mind tells me this is mythology, like Zeus, or Beowulf, or Gilgamesh, or Frodo, Bilbo and Dumbledore. These are campfire stories from pre-scientific times that attempt to explain the -then many- mysteries of existence. Those days are gone, and we now know that we are not at the center of the universe, that space isn't made of water, that stars are not lights, that the world is not flat, that humans are part of an evolutionary chain and that the earth is billions of years old. Perhaps it's time to embrace the future, r10k, and leave the cave drawings behind you.

Just one person's opinion.... I could be wrong.

The book, Eaters of the Dead is a good retelling of the Beowulf legend.

Tags for this video have been changed from 'Muslim, allah akbar, Vikings, Antonio Banderas, Vladimir Kulich' to 'Muslim, allah akbar, Vikings, Antonio Banderas, Vladimir Kulich, Beowulf' - edited by Fusionaut

Amazingly, NASA took the famous deep field photo and passed it through a signal analyzer consisting of 200,000 quad-core CPU's in a Beowulf cluster running a stripped down version of Redhat's RHEL. For roughly 10^29 iterations, these processors ran an optimized fast Fourier transform on the collected data until a pure signal was collected. That signal, a complex series of interlocking sign waves, was then passed through the cluster again, the researchers were totally shocked by the result. A single, simple message, broadcast by the universe its self, to the human race:

"Sarah Palin's a cunt."

Science is truly, truly amazing.

hehehe

In reply to this comment by kronosposeidon:
*promote Beowulf chat

*promote Beowulf chat

Re: Comments:

We should have more control over which comments appear as we browse the site. Edeot mentioned auto-hiding comments with a low vote total. Along those lines, we should be able to hide comments based on the following criteria, which are turned on or off based on the original user.

- Low Vote total (vote threshold set by user)
- Banned User
- Comments with only invocations
- Siftbot acting on an invocation
- Featured comment box

Speaking of invocations, they clutter up the comment space of videos, which is annoying. Sometimes invocations are included with other comments, but when a comment is only invocations, it shouldn't be considered a comment. So when a user posts a comment that is only invocations, Siftbot should automatically delete the comment and replace it with his response (along with a quote of the original invocation). That way the invocation doesn't take up extra space and isn't counted in the video's comment total.

Re: Videos:

Just one thought -- I still think there should be a visual indication of whether or not a PQueued video is currently in Beggar's Canyon.

Re: Money:

We all know Siftbot is secretly plotting to rule the world; why doesn't he use some of those cycles to add power to a beowulf cluster and bring in a bit of extra cash for the site? You'd think Siftbot would take a larger role in preserving the site and thus his own existence: We all saw what happened to CADIE, after all.

it's a belter. was forced to read it at school and only realised just how incredible it is when i re-read it years later.

it surprises me, but pleases me, that hollywood hasn't dragged it back to the big screen lately.

In reply to this comment by blankfist:
That's a great list. I'm a huge fan of Lord of the Flies.

In reply to this comment by deputydog:
making history - stephen fry
misery - stephen king
the wasp factory - iain banks
beowulf
marabou stork nightmares - irvine welsh
lord of the flies - william golding
join me - danny wallace
to kill a mockingbird - harper lee
the beach - alex garland
the bfg - roald dahl

That's a great list. I'm a huge fan of Lord of the Flies.

In reply to this comment by deputydog:
making history - stephen fry
misery - stephen king
the wasp factory - iain banks
beowulf
marabou stork nightmares - irvine welsh
lord of the flies - william golding
join me - danny wallace
to kill a mockingbird - harper lee
the beach - alex garland
the bfg - roald dahl

making history - stephen fry
misery - stephen king
the wasp factory - iain banks
beowulf
marabou stork nightmares - irvine welsh
lord of the flies - william golding
join me - danny wallace
to kill a mockingbird - harper lee
the beach - alex garland
the bfg - roald dahl

*talks

Wow, this technology is truly awesome. A great big leap for the visual effects industry. I'm sure there are many movie ideas which suddenly become feasible with these techniques.
I have seen the movie and I could quite easily spot that the face was computer generated. But that didn't detract from the movie at all because the face did show convincing expressions and emotions. Certainly if you compare it with Beowulf or The Polar Express it's miles ahead. And I'm sure that this technology will only get better.
Can't believe this hasn't gotten more votes. Maybe you should add *no spoilers* in the title