Happy Birthday, Finland

[cimorene]

Today is Finnish independence day! That makes it a bank holiday! Wax had the day off too, although many of her colleagues were working because she does customer service. But we should always have Wednesdays off as well as Saturdays and Sundays. This was really nice.

It got back up to zero but only after snowing like hell all day yesterday and all night, so there were drifts of the White Stuff everywhere. We tramped down the hill to the little discount everything store - idk, it's a bit like a dollar general maybe? - and bought a string of battery powered lights for the volunteer Christmas tree growing in our yard. It's just reached a bit over six feet high and is absolutely adorable all laden with snow, and we're not going to have a tree inside this year because it's Wax's family's year off when her brothers go to their in-laws. Then we hung the birdfeeder and put up a suet feeder in the yard.

The new laptop got here Tuesday, so we spent Tuesday evening in the agonizing process of trying to set up the Windows 11 Pro on it without giving Microsoft our personal information (turns out this is no longer possible actually! After a lot of googling I can confirm that I had to give up and give them my email and tick the box about them using it for marketing just to make Windows work at all. You can remove the email from the account afterwards.) (This Windows instance is just in case we need Windows for something; the laptop will mostly be running Linux Mint.)

I've been rewatching the extended Lord of the Rings this week. It's been quite a while, maybe more than fifteen years? But they still feel like I remember just about every moment. I'm not actually sure how many times I watched them back in the day, but I definitely think it was a lot less than I heard from many other people in my fandom generation. I'm not a video-watching superuser - not at all my preferred method of input. It's funny what things are familiar and which things look slightly different in hindsight. I rewatched a video recently in which Lindsay Ellis called Fellowship "a perfect movie" (she was talking mostly about nostalgia here, not actually saying it was literally flawless), but I've always preferred TTT. Fellowship has a much sweeter and mellower mood so it's understandable that it felt more magical at the time to many people, but I think the reason I liked it less is mainly that it has a few more rough spots in the script. TTT has a lot of my favorite moments, but there's no shortage of those in Fellowship either, actually!

It's just that a few of the adaptation bumps chafe more, like the bit where the ring wraiths are stabbing beds stuffed with feather pillows while the hobbits all lie together in Aragorn's bed elsewhere and they cut back and forth. The jumpscare where Bilbo sort of transforms into a horror movie creature reaching for the ring, for example - I mean, it did WORK, but it still feels out of place, to me. The surprise reveal of the skeletons in Moria is cut awfully close, so Gimli is inside stepping over skeletons literally before he realizes, but the audience can see them, so is he supposed to be blind? Most of the things you notice as changes for adaptation in TTT are positives to my eye, in contrast, although the feel of the whole conflict where Aragorn tries to break up with Arwen and she's going to sail to Valinor and changes her mind and Elrond tries to pick a fight over it with Aragorn directly like she's not a fully-grown several thousand years old being - it all feels a little overly obvious and silly, although for the most part the Aragorn and Arwen plot rings true. It's great that Faramir gets more screentime and you can see that's why they did it, but I really wish they'd found another conflict for him than intending to take the ring and going so far along that path. I don't mind the bits of Legolas and Gimli at Helm's Deep that turn a bit comedic - I don't think it goes too far. The bad stew Eowyn made and Legolas's face when he says "You look terrible" are still fantastic, which I guess I had forgotten slightly behind their meme status. The biggest problem is still all the armies of evil being obviously (visually) Asian or African.

Comments

[stranger]

I also was blown away by the LOTR movies (like everyone else, well, yes), except there were a few bumps -- mostly different ones -- but the overall feel and the huge percentage of things that came out beautifully really carried the whole story in the new format. Some things, like Bilbo's fit of ringlust in Rivendell, were *definitely* not what I'd visualized myself from reading the book, but going back and re-reading would show me it was a possible interpretation. Some things were changed but worked on screen anyway, just enough that it was like reading the story for the first time again, and that was the most valuable part of it, to me. And, it's still wonderful to read what someone else who knows the books thinks of this huge project based on them.

[cimorene]

Yeah, they're a deathless classic! I don't think I've ever seen any other movies that often in theaters. Most of the additions were inspired and the casting and visual design are almost flawless. There are spots where the books worked better, but they're also a different medium. Overall the movies form a more vivid and memorable story perhaps, and a lot of my issues are due to preferring the written medium personally.

[harpers_child]

As a heads up, Win11 displays your full legal name (which you had to give to them and couldn't avoid) on the start menu of your laptop. A thing which you may want to have in a public space like a coffee shop. There is no way I have found to change it or turn it off.

[cimorene]

Oh well actually, you can avoid that if your legal name is too long. Mine is long and hyphenated which was disallowed, even with the hyphen and the space removed! Either it was too many characters or you can't have multiple capital letters! So anyway, mine isn't there at all: I had to lie to get past account creation. Lol.

Not that it would really be a significant risk for me, really, since I almost never leave the house and I live in a tiny town anyway.

But you can also create a new user account that isn't connected to a Microsoft account, make it the administrator, and then remove the one with the Microsoft account. I've seen several tutorials for that, although I didn't do it myself (yet?).

[princessofgeeks]

I love your observations about the LOTR movies!!!!! And I liked TTT as much as FOTR.

[cimorene]

I also feel a bit bad for Pippin, and he did a little better in TTT, poor guy. I don't say the characterization was inaccurate or anything, and it was perhaps an effective story move, but I just felt like the text was picking on him a bit in FOTR just to add a subplot.