Dream 2014/12/4

I have a pretty good inkling on where my subconscious drew inspiration for those strange weapon names. Firstly, I believe the spark came from a repeated phrase in "A Song of Ice and Fire":

All the best swords have names.

Going further back, the best swords from "The Lord of the Rings" also had names, e.g. Glamdring, Orcrist, Sting. Finally, let's not forget just how badass names can be in the Halo universe.

Truth and Reconciliation

Acceptance of Cuteness

Have you ever seen a Japanese airline plane? Or their elementary school buses?
Check some of their school buses, for your viewing pleasure.

 As a whole, the Japanese have a great appreciation for aesthetic Cuteness that goes far beyond what we have here in the U.S.
Here, Cuteness is a quality that is linked to children and pet animals.
I am excluding the usage of the word 'cute' when applied to attractive females and males here.

According to tradition, at a certain age American boys are supposed to become 'men', symptoms of which include spurning cute stuff as childish and/or 'girly', sprouting facial and chest hair, choppin' down trees, making their own beef jerky and beatin' on their wives.

In conjunction with the increasing popularity of nerdiness/geekdom, Cuteness has gotten a massive boost in mainstream acceptance with such modern wonders as Lolcats, YouTube videos of cats and anthropomorphized pictures of other animals' faces. Seriously, it's done a lot to pave the way for guys to be able to say they find stuff cute. I attribute this to the coupling of Funny with Cute. If a guy just made a bunch of Cute stuff with kitties, I guarantee people would question his sexual orientation, but since it's a joke, it's all good.

A more recent case would be the burst of popularity for the show My Little Pony in a demographic that is most certainly not the target one: teenage to adult males. There are a lot of reasons these 'bronies' claim to like the show but since I haven't done my That looks like shit! Lemme watch it so I can talk about it routine I won't spew hate on something that I admit to knowing nothing about.
At first glance though, I suspect a healthy dose of hipsters-drinking-PBR class irony at play here.

Also, stuff like this makes it funny. Speaking of LOTR:

LOTR and The Matrix

I've always thought of these two film trilogies as a sort of twin pairing:
The Matrix trilogy - Masterpieces of science fiction cinema.
LOTR trilogy - Masterpieces of high fantasy cinema.

Since I'm going to delve into the Matrix films in depth later on I won't waste text talking about them here.

Like any true Tolkien fan, I read the books long before the Peter Jackson films started development. And as a fan, I must say that Jackson did an excellent job with the material. Too often you get film adaptations that are mediocre at best. "The book was better" is a common mantra when it comes to dealing with those types of films. In this case I was supremely pleased to see that they weren't just some cash grab endeavour. I mean, look at that! Three books => three movies. You remember when The Fellowship of the Ring [2001] came out and everyone noted that it was a whopping three hours long? But then you went and saw it and didn't even notice? You came out of the theater and the sky was black and you thought to yourself, "Whoa, its been three hours?" That was me.
I have no doubt that if it were to be released today the studio would have decided to cut it in half and double their ticket sales.
That's not a dig at Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, by the way. Sometimes its beneficial to have two movies rather than try to cram everything into one package.

I love The Matrix for making me think. The LOTR series doesn't have all those metaphysics and ontology issues. What it did was make me feel and make me love these characters. The movies did the same.

Sometimes I feel a sadness for Tolkien fans who died before they ever saw these movies. They missed out on something beautiful.