Sorry, Interweb...http://www.ansereg.com had some problems due to high traffic and it'll be live again shortly.

Life here is good, having had a family holiday with my partner I'm now catching up on chosen family.

Last night, I reprised something from 10 years ago by seeing a Wellington-first-public showing of a Tolkien film by Peter Jackson at the Embassy Theatre in Wellington. How time flies ( Read more... )

Two weeks out from the first installment of The Hobbit, Wellington is officially bonkers. Official events include:

* Banners everywhere promoting The Hobbit
* Hobbit silhouettes on the post office building
* Bag End door installation at Wellington Embassy theater
* Gollum installation at airport
* Traffic blocked/cut off downtown on day of movie ( Read more... )

To help those of you caught in the heat wave cool off - the cutest thing I've seen all year that doesn't involve cats - this music video. I have the pleasure of being acquainted with the songwriter/singer.

Click to view

Yesterday the phone rang exceptionally early. I grabbed it in a state of expatriate freak-out, expecting news of a car accident or something. It was my mother, who's usually excellent about this sort of thing. Turns out that she is going to be having carotid artery-clearing surgery in the very near future. Her carotid arteries are 90% occluded, and ( Read more... )

Rather touched - the Rome Tolkien Society has just asked to translate my seven-year-old essay on Tolkien and the British Arts and Crafts movement.Re-reading that old thing, there's some interesting stuff about the first round of the modern craft movement and Britain's love of the industrial and new, which we are, oh so ironically, romanticizing ( Read more... )

Ahahahah! Tolkien fandom trope bingo cards! My personal favourite was “Eligible Bachelor Baggins,” which we’ll be seeing a LOT of starting in December.

It’s about the 10th "fanniversary" of the Ansereg site. Ten years of sharing stories and ideas, fielding odd questions on sexuality in Tolkien, and being corrected on the % of Maia that Elladan and ( Read more... )

Due to my health, I wasn't going anywhere yesterday. Which was probably for the best. I hadn't been planning on going to the Hobbit casting call - I didn't fit any of the criteria, being neither very short, tall, jolie-laide, or elvishly lovely. But even without me, it was so crazy that the police shut it down! Traffic in the area, ten minutes away ( Read more... )

Augh. The night before last, a dream about my dead cat - that I had raised her from the dead with inappropriate bad-karma necromancy, for a briefly allotted time. In the dream, I alternated between cuddling her frantically and worrying about dispersing the gelatinous blood fetish-glob that was part of the spell. In the morning, I had the question: ( Read more... )

I'm intrigued by the "man who owns 15 things." Does he sleep commando, or in the t-shirt and running shorts? Does he not miss cooking for himself and others? How are two shoes not making it 16 things? And how big is that "toiletry kit"?

I was intrigued enough to come up with my own minimal traveling/working self set of possessions. I bumped it up to ( Read more... )