Parentheticals

I have been working on the viking game some more. It is coming along, but it still isn't working very well. I tried it out at work on Thursday, and people said that they liked it, but they were just being nice. I think that it is getting better, however it could be moving along more quickly. This week it rained a lot. We love the rain, because with great rain comes great gardens. Also, we just love the rain in general, since we came from a beautiful place known as north of the Garden of Eden before we entered this lone and dreary wilderness that we call Utah. For Rea's date this week, Mike and the kids watched an episode of "My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic" in which Spike got greedy and turned into a wicked huge dragon until he learned to be generous again. It was apparently a big deal to Timmy. His favorite character is Spike, and after it was over he spent about half an hour grabbing Alison with wide eyes and repeating to her over and over, "Pike! Ra-ra...

We saw the last Hobbit movie on Tuesday this week. It had a huge amount of fighting in it, but it was also some times funny. Perhaps the best character was Dain. He was not comic relief, but he was very funny. There were a lot of moments in the movie that felt like they were taken out of a gameplay report of Dwarf Fortress  (all the leaders being so much more powerful than the underlings that they were only able to be killed by each other, the leaders all riding on weird war beasts, the general shape of the fortress). There was also this one weird moment where some of the dwarves apparently leveled up and took the Improved Mount feat so that they could procure war rams out of thin air. The best part of the movie was perhaps the part where Galadriel singlehandedly defeated all of the ringwraiths and Sauron with a Spirit Bomb  attack. I never thought that she was the most powerful person on the middle earth, but it seems that Peter Jackson does. Tolkien did like her a lot...

"If you need me, I will come," Galadriel promises Gandalf in Peter Jackson's film of The Hobbit .  She acts as if she's conferring some great aid that will surely relieve all his anxieties.  When you think about the relative positions of the Elves and the Wizards in Tolkien's universe, this is sort of like a preschooler trying to relieve her dad's mind by promising to help with the yard work.  Sure, she might be able to do some good, but really, this is going to be his job, and he has way more power to do it. Galadriel is one of the most powerful of Tolkien's elves.  She is the inheritor of noble blood from three of the four (plus) races or divisions of elves: her paternal grandmother is the sister of Ingwe, king of the Vanyar, the High-Elves who sit at the feet of the gods, her paternal grandfather is Finwe, king of the Noldor, the hot-blooded elves who are always making and doing and have the most effect on the history of the world, and her maternal g...