Sir Ian McKellen, On Acting

A lot of would-be Dungeons and Dragons thespians will benefit from Sir Ian McKellen's insights on acting.  Most illuminating to me are his secrets regarding how he knows what his character's lines are.

The Hobbit Movie Production Video 6

Find it right here.

Tastes Like Chicken

Cold chicken, that is. This is a still photo from a recent article about The Hobbit Movie. You can find the reference at TheOneRing.net.

Hobbit Movie: Production Video Number 5

So, are we getting excited yet?

The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey

Terrain For Skirmish Games

I enjoy an occasional LOTRSBG skirmish. I was introduced to the tabletop battles hobby late in my roleplaying game career, sometime in 2003 if memory serves. It was Games Workshop's Lord Of The Rings miniatures, and the related strategy battle game, that led me there.

Once you are introduced to tabletop skirmish games, there's a natural progression towards the other facets of the hobby, including terrain-building. This is a work-in-progress; a rocky outcropping that can be used as cover and visual interest. I think it needs some grass and foliage to finish it off.

Here are a couple of additional photos of the same rocky outcropping. I added some miniatures to provide scale.

Timelords and Ringlords

This is indeed a strange coincidence. Jimmy Cauty, one half of the discordian band know alternately as The JAMs, The Timelords, and The KLF, was also an accomplished artist, and created two posters, for The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, in the late 70's/early 80's. Though I never owned either of those posters, I remember them well. I think one of my middle school buddies had one or both of them, as he and his mum were huge Tolkien fans.

I was heavily into acid-house music back in the late 1980's and early 1990's. Two of my favorite 1980's Calgary dance clubs, The Banke and The Republik, had a DJ who was in a University class with me, and he would cut us tracks from the latest Chicago and English acid-house band releases while he was DJing. The KLF was my favorite acid-house band. It didn't hurt that The KLF politics bordered on the anarchic and their antics were gleeful social and cultural disruptions.

The KLF's The White Room album was sheer genius. Too bad The KLF's follow-up album, The Black Room (a planned collaboration with the heavy metal band, Extreme Noise Terror) was still-born.

These LOTR and Hobbit posters are incredibly intricate, and the Gandalf in Cauty's Lord of the Rings poster is among my favorite renditions of the character.

I just think it's odd that Jimmy Cauty, one of the original Timelords -- Doctorin' the Tardis -- should have also been a fan of Tolkien's Ringlords.