Week Ending 6/1

Well, I'm doing a bit better this week than I was last week. No big highs or lows, just making it through.

Did a little painting. Did a little writing. Got in an interesting game of Age of Sigmar with Juno... Stormcast Eternals (golden armored demi-god heroes) play very differently than my usual Beastmen or Barbarians. 

Mostly, I lay around a watched stuff on streaming. I finished watching Amazon's Rings of Power... which I think deserves some comment.

So, I grew reading the Hobbit. I've read the Lord of the Rings trilogy, though I confess I was much older when finally got through the whole thing. So, I like Tolkien's Middle Earth, but I'm not a Tolkien fanatic. I can't recite the Ring spell from memory, and I don't know the Aragorn's lineage back to the Second Age. I've only read some of the Silmarillion and that only very recently. I know that film adaptations of novels are going to be different. I enjoyed Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings movies. I even enjoyed the first of the Hobbit movies, though I hated the other two. 

I feel similarly about Frank Herbert's Dune. I consider Dune to be the Middle Earth of science fiction. I have watched various adaptations of Dune from the David Lynch film in the '80s (it has Sting... the singer, not the elven dagger), the SciFi Channel miniseries (the best adaptation IMO) and the modern Denis Villeneuve film duology (liked the first one, hated the second). 

So, all that by way of saying, I was willing to give Rings of Power a chance despite (or maybe because of) having heard bad things about it online. 

All in all, I think Rings of Power is a little like David Lunch's Dune. It's visually stunning. It's a good story. It has some character names, place names and broad story arcs in common with the original work and is otherwise its own thing. In short, I think Rings of Power is a pretty good fantasy show. Is it Middle Earth? Well, not the one Tolkien wrote. It's not even as close to it as Peter Jackson's movies (which took their own share of liberties). Still, it was fun to watch.

Yeah, that was pretty much my week.

Onward