Interesting Links for 21-01-2016

[andrewducker]

• Sky will push all subscribers onto IPv6 network by summer 2016
  • ipv6 internet sky
• The ants on a stick puzzle
  • ants puzzle
• Whatever happened to television’s most famous couples? (No, really, you want to read this. All of it.)
  • tv scifi funny satire
• PETER JACKSON: 'THE VERY HUNGRY CATERPILLAR WILL HAVE TO BE 5 FILMS'
  • peterjackson funny movies
• Nature

Comments

[kalimac]

1) I'm from the USA, but I've never heard of our supposed culinary delicacy "ants on a stick." I have, however, in Chinese restaurants had "ants climbing up a tree," which is glass noodles with bits of ground meat.

2) I've only ever seen one of the tv shows in the "famous couples" bit, and evidently not enough of it to be able to make any sense of its parody.

3) On the other hand, I chortled at the Peter Jackson parody. Yes, that'd be just like him.

4) Star Wars release pushed back to December: Excellent example of the weird experience of being told that something you hadn't even known is not so.

5) Sad music: Really confusing, and probably confused. Says that music only sounds sad because you know the performer died young, that there's nothing inherently sad in the music. Then changes its mind and says there is. Then changes its mind halfway back again. Needs to read Deryck Cooke's The Language of Music, which actually analyzes the point

[andrewducker]

It's not so much a parody of what would actually happen to famous couples. More of the audience's expectations that they're about to get either some fluffy fanfic about how lovely those couple's lives would end up being, or a sarcastic look at how awful they really were. And instead what we get is a sci-fi short story that slowly intrudes into this expectation, taking us from there into an apocalyptic fightback against some kind of invaders.

I agree about Peter Jackson. I'm not actually sure how to feel about him any more. His sensibilities and mine clearly match up in some ways, and clearly so very not in others. Which I find more difficult than if he made movies that I just didn't like in the slightest.

[kalimac]

My problem is that the movies just don't appeal to me, at all. Whereas the books that inspired them are - as you can see from the way I natter on about them - my dearest literary loves in the world. The difference is so vertiginous that I simply can't understand people treating them as interchangeable manifestations of the same thing. Especially since, when I complain about the differences, the same people say "Of course they're different, you idiot: one's a movie and one's a book."

[andrewducker]

The thing is, there are lots of ways of translating a book into a film. And not all of them require you to insert an incompetent government official who largely gets laughs for slapstick and dressing up in women's clothing.

Or ridiculously long sequences in which your largely interchangeable main characters run along CGI corridors engaging in silly antics to kill CGI goblins in a manner that looks more like a computer game than anything else.

My standards, in this case, are undoubtedly not as high as yours. But still _really_.

[kalimac]

That's what I've been saying all along (and about the LOTR movies: the Hobbit movies are not any worse, just more blatant). Every single explanation for why "it had to be that way, it's a mooooovie" is total hogwash.

[bashou]

I still wish Tolkien finished his third version of The Hobbit; it's not as if folks were vocal about the major changes between the first and second editions.

[kalimac]

I do not. "Riddles in the Dark" aside - and that was the most brilliant piece of retconning in the history of fantasy literature - the published changes in The Hobbit are actually very minor, and are otherwise more concerned with matching the facts of The Hobbit up to The Silmarillion than with anything to do with The Lord of the Rings. Whereas the unfinished 1960 version would have been an entire rewriting of the story, more concerned with tone and style than substantive content, and would have turned The Hobbit into a drab copy of The Lord of the Rings - which is what Jackson did in his movies - eliminating the delightful and distinctive book it had been and fortunately still is.