King Arthur. or When Filthy, Pissed-Off People Attack
Dum de dum...
Went to Cicco's birthday party yesterday, it was pretty nice. Janaye's camp has a good beach and dock/raft thing, which I liked a lot. I got Cicco a copy of Niven's Ringworld, which is the conceptual father of Halo. Although Bungie made Halo's Halo a bit smaller than Niven calculated the smallest Ringworld could be... for stability, it would have to have the mass of Jupiter, be a million miles wide, have walls on both sides a thousand feet high, and have an inside surface area three million times that of Earth's surface. :)
The good part of that is that spinning it even very (relatively) slowly would generate enough gravity to hold an atmosphere in, so you wouldn't need a roof. Also, as per the laws of physics, once a certain distance above the inside surface, gravity would be nearly nil, so travel to anywhere else on the ring would be pretty speedy, as you wouldn't need to travel on the surface itself, but could take shortcuts across the diameter of the ring.
With a few large slabs suspended in the middle of the ring, you could control sunlight and develop alternating areas of light and dark, and tailor them to say, Earth's diurnal cycle.
Niven conceived of the Ringworld as an alternative to a Dyson Sphere... which is a whole different kettle of macrophysics. As massive as it sounds, a Ringworld would be considerably cheaper to build than a Dyson Sphere, and arguably more stable and suitable for colonization. Either way, both are awesome... Who needs planets, anyway?
Anyways, after swimming a bit and eating, we all went back to the Emerald to watch King Arthur.
All I can say is... WTF man, WTF.
So Arthur is the Roman commander of the "Salmatian Knights", who are named in an Arthurian way: Lancelot, Galahad, Gawain... etc...
Anyway... "Arturius Castus" was a roman dude who leads the crazy knights... who are all adept at kicking ass in various manners. That part was kind of cool. So Arthur and his dudes go to rescue some dudes on the orders of a Catholic bishop... who was really a weirdass guy... in fact, all the christians in this movie were fucked up.
But moving along, people died... Arthur screws Guinevere (Don't get me started on her.... another huge WTF)... decides to lead the Britons (up until now led by Merlin, who is a freaky guerilla dude) against the Saxons... who are large, dirty, and probably played by the same extras they used for the Uruk-Hai in LoTR, because they march in the same manner.
They were only interesting because of their gross incompetence at doing anything but burning villages. Arthur and his "Magnificent 7 plus Guinevere (who is luckily an expert archer)" kill 200 or so of them, losing only one guy because he ran out to smash the ice the Saxons were standing on with a battleaxe... at which point he was hit with a couple arrows from the Saxons' "Armor-Piercing Crossbows".... oh man... Arthur got crossbowed in the neck, but I guess he was OK.
In the end Arthur and a bunch of British folk (equally as dirty as the Saxons, but less well clothed) kill all the Saxon (as they suddenly became a plural noun halfway through the movie) at Hadrian's Wall. Trebuchets were used, which was cool.... Lancelot killed a guy by chucking his sword at him (I love when that happens)... etc etc.
The only things about this movie worth anything at all were a few scenes obviously designed to evoke the more conventional image of Arthur, like the Round Table, which I thought looked pretty cool. There was a nice shot where Arthur is alone at the round table, looking over a map. Another where he is about to sword a guy in the throat and he's like "Go ahead, spill my blood with Excalibur and make this ground holy." amd the last scene where Guinevere (who actually looks female at this point) and he are holding Excalibur aloft... it didn't look Roman.
The item that pissed me off the most was where he got Excalibur... he pulled it from his father's grave. That's just a blatant, terrible, transparent misrepresentation of the legend... I'm all for artistic license, but that was ridiculous.
In short, this would have been a quite fine action movie if they had STAYED AWAY FROM THE FREAKIN' ARTHUR LEGENDS.
If this had taken place in a completely fictional land, with different names, it would have been fine... but noooo... gotta be stupid and use Arthur.
If you want to know what actually happened, I encourage you to read the Arthurian Chronicles in Bulfinch's Mythology.
If you want a re-interpreted version that ACTUALLY MAKES SENSE, read The Crystal Cave.
If you want a really far-out extension of the myths, read C.S. Lewis' Out Of The Silent Planet and the following two books, Perelandra and That Hideous Strength.
Perelandra is funny, because it revolves around an epic battle of good vs. evil for the innocent fledgling world of Venus, as fought by a posessed professor and a philologist who reminds me of Mr. Nelson.
Anyway... read the books, they kick ass.
Went to Cicco's birthday party yesterday, it was pretty nice. Janaye's camp has a good beach and dock/raft thing, which I liked a lot. I got Cicco a copy of Niven's Ringworld, which is the conceptual father of Halo. Although Bungie made Halo's Halo a bit smaller than Niven calculated the smallest Ringworld could be... for stability, it would have to have the mass of Jupiter, be a million miles wide, have walls on both sides a thousand feet high, and have an inside surface area three million times that of Earth's surface. :)
The good part of that is that spinning it even very (relatively) slowly would generate enough gravity to hold an atmosphere in, so you wouldn't need a roof. Also, as per the laws of physics, once a certain distance above the inside surface, gravity would be nearly nil, so travel to anywhere else on the ring would be pretty speedy, as you wouldn't need to travel on the surface itself, but could take shortcuts across the diameter of the ring.
With a few large slabs suspended in the middle of the ring, you could control sunlight and develop alternating areas of light and dark, and tailor them to say, Earth's diurnal cycle.
Niven conceived of the Ringworld as an alternative to a Dyson Sphere... which is a whole different kettle of macrophysics. As massive as it sounds, a Ringworld would be considerably cheaper to build than a Dyson Sphere, and arguably more stable and suitable for colonization. Either way, both are awesome... Who needs planets, anyway?
Anyways, after swimming a bit and eating, we all went back to the Emerald to watch King Arthur.
All I can say is... WTF man, WTF.
So Arthur is the Roman commander of the "Salmatian Knights", who are named in an Arthurian way: Lancelot, Galahad, Gawain... etc...
Anyway... "Arturius Castus" was a roman dude who leads the crazy knights... who are all adept at kicking ass in various manners. That part was kind of cool. So Arthur and his dudes go to rescue some dudes on the orders of a Catholic bishop... who was really a weirdass guy... in fact, all the christians in this movie were fucked up.
But moving along, people died... Arthur screws Guinevere (Don't get me started on her.... another huge WTF)... decides to lead the Britons (up until now led by Merlin, who is a freaky guerilla dude) against the Saxons... who are large, dirty, and probably played by the same extras they used for the Uruk-Hai in LoTR, because they march in the same manner.
They were only interesting because of their gross incompetence at doing anything but burning villages. Arthur and his "Magnificent 7 plus Guinevere (who is luckily an expert archer)" kill 200 or so of them, losing only one guy because he ran out to smash the ice the Saxons were standing on with a battleaxe... at which point he was hit with a couple arrows from the Saxons' "Armor-Piercing Crossbows".... oh man... Arthur got crossbowed in the neck, but I guess he was OK.
In the end Arthur and a bunch of British folk (equally as dirty as the Saxons, but less well clothed) kill all the Saxon (as they suddenly became a plural noun halfway through the movie) at Hadrian's Wall. Trebuchets were used, which was cool.... Lancelot killed a guy by chucking his sword at him (I love when that happens)... etc etc.
The only things about this movie worth anything at all were a few scenes obviously designed to evoke the more conventional image of Arthur, like the Round Table, which I thought looked pretty cool. There was a nice shot where Arthur is alone at the round table, looking over a map. Another where he is about to sword a guy in the throat and he's like "Go ahead, spill my blood with Excalibur and make this ground holy." amd the last scene where Guinevere (who actually looks female at this point) and he are holding Excalibur aloft... it didn't look Roman.
The item that pissed me off the most was where he got Excalibur... he pulled it from his father's grave. That's just a blatant, terrible, transparent misrepresentation of the legend... I'm all for artistic license, but that was ridiculous.
In short, this would have been a quite fine action movie if they had STAYED AWAY FROM THE FREAKIN' ARTHUR LEGENDS.
If this had taken place in a completely fictional land, with different names, it would have been fine... but noooo... gotta be stupid and use Arthur.
If you want to know what actually happened, I encourage you to read the Arthurian Chronicles in Bulfinch's Mythology.
If you want a re-interpreted version that ACTUALLY MAKES SENSE, read The Crystal Cave.
If you want a really far-out extension of the myths, read C.S. Lewis' Out Of The Silent Planet and the following two books, Perelandra and That Hideous Strength.
Perelandra is funny, because it revolves around an epic battle of good vs. evil for the innocent fledgling world of Venus, as fought by a posessed professor and a philologist who reminds me of Mr. Nelson.
Anyway... read the books, they kick ass.