An unexpected disappointment

I had a sad realization today while walking through a Target. Actually, I had the realization earlier, and then I had it again--can you have a realization twice... I mean, I could say "I had a hamburger yesterday, and I had a hamburger today," but I guess if it were the same hamburger both times that would be gross.

Well. Anyway. Today in Target I passed a display of DVDs and Blu-Rays of The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey. My realization was not that, hey, The Hobbit is out on video now. My realization is that I had no desire to buy it.

This came as a bit of a shock for me. Understand that there was no question in my mind about getting any of the Lord of the Rings trilogy special edition DVDs. (Not that I bought it--but I made dern sure I got it for Christmas.) So did basically everyone I knew. Remember that when these DVDs came out I lived with three other people. Through most of college we had four copies of the trilogy between us. It wasn't a matter of having access to the movies--there were lots of things I never owned in college because one of my roommates had one.

I don't want to wax too exuberant about the connection my friends and I had with that movie--I really think a lot of people felt the same way--but it was something more than you can get from a really good movie, or from fully leveraging really popular IP. I speak now in the language of the enemy, because I think the enemy really needs to hear that. The reason the Lord of the Rings movies made so much money, and lasted so long as a cultural force, is because people loved them--in a sense that is not just a more intense version of "like."

What possibly makes me sadder than my disappointment in The Hobbit 1/3 itself is the sense that the people in charge of it made too much money to register that they screwed up. But I saw Return of the King three or four times in theaters. I saw The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey once in the theater and, three months later, don't want so much to see it again as I would like to un-see about a third of it.

In the language of the enemy, take $10 for a movie ticket, multiply by two repeat viewings. Add the cost of a special-edition Blu-Ray. Multiply all that by the number of people who think more or less like me.

There's more missed opportunity than actual profit.

Back when it was almost timely I made my opinions on The Hobbit known. Specifically, I said:

I am more optimistic about the second movie than I might be. It will probably consist mostly of fanfic about the White Council and the Necromancer, but I will give that a go if Necky is a more compelling villain than Azog.

It's actually a little frightening how effective TH:tUJ's artistic triage was. Fred and Satan both knew what notes would have to play true in order for fans to come back for part 2/3. What absolutely had to work really worked, but there was lot of slack in between.

 That's what I thought just after seeing it. Three months later, if The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug came out next week, I think I'd read a few reviews. I'd wait and see.

Learning about fiction

“The best thing for being sad,” replied Merlyn, beginning to puff and blow, “is to learn something. That's the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honour trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then — to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting. Learning is the only thing for you. Look what a lot of things there are to learn — pure science, the only purity there is.  You can learn astronomy in a lifetime, natural history in three, literature in six. And then, after you have exhausted a milliard lifetimes in biology and medicine and theocriticism and geography and history and economics — why, you can start to make a cartwheel out of the appropriate wood, or spend fifty years learning to begin to learn to beat your adversary at fencing. After that you can start again on mathematics, until is it is time to learn to plough.”

-T.H. White, The Once and Future King

I should frame that somewhere. I guess it's too much to embroider on a pillow. (I couldn't embroider a pillow with as much as a diacritic under my own power anyway.)

Every once in a while a seriously academic nonfiction book grabs my attention and holds it, sometimes to the detriment of other things I should be doing.. Last year that book was Lost Christianities, by Bart Ehrman. This year, so far, it's been Robin Hood, by J.C. Holt. Which is to say that lately I've been enjoying learning about the provenance and evolution of the legend of Robin Hood.

I would wax rhapsodic for at least a little while here about the pleasure of learning something--almost anything--but I decided to let Merlyn do it because he's better at it. What's left for me to say is that while Robin Hood is drier than my usual fare, it kept surprising me and I kept surprising myself by going back to it in preference of very well written fiction that I also happen to be reading.

I took away a number of wait-what-no-really discoveries. The things that are original to the story aren't what you'd think. "Original" is a word I should use advisedly here--by the time anyone wrote any of the Robin Hood stories down (in a copy we still have), they had already spread and evolved. But the first stories already have Little John, Will Scarlett (or something like it), and the Sheriff of Nottingham. They also seem to be pretty emphatic about Robin's devotion to the Virgin Mary--not an aspect we see very often anymore. Go figure.

I'm not really going anywhere with this right now. I thought I would point out that, of all the characters in Robin Hood's band, Friar Tuck is the one with a claim to actually having existed. Also, the legend seems to have spread far and wide in England in connection with church fundraisers in the 15th century--of all things. It seems an actor would dress as Robin Hood and sell pins and liveries; people would buy these to get into his band, and then (one supposes) they would go around town shaking down their neighbors. Come to think of it, I kind of wish my church had done a fundraiser like that.

So, now I know that stuff.

While I'm whining...

All the negative press about the release of the new Sim City game gave me a powerful hankering to play one of the older, functioning versions. Once upon a time I frittered many hours in my cool, musty basement building cities on my Super Nintendo. The Super Nintendo survives, and my copy of Sim City survives too, but apparently I never brought it with me to Maryland. So woe is me, and I must hanker on unfulfilled.

Maybe if Dwarf Fortress would hurry up and get the next update out, I could get my management fix that way.

Whine, whine, whine. Ah, well. While I'm whining.

With every passing year I become more convinced that Daylight Saving Time is an awful idea. Have people ever really been unable, en masse, to adjust their schedules to do their business when the sun was out if they actually cared about it?

In my brief research tonight, I discovered that a few countries (Iceland, Russia, and Belarus) have decided that DST is such a great idea that they have it all year round. The mind reels. In Russia, noon is just at 1:00 p.m. Do the people there feel better about getting up in the morning because their clocks read an hour ahead of what they should? Or is this one of those systems they've worked out because they kept being late to things?

A spoiler-free (and information-light) update on Hengist and Undine

Fellow writers, have you ever been editing a book, possibly not for the first time, and found yourself thinking, "I hope that people other than me find something interesting in that scene where X happens, because I don't mean to do this but every time I revise it it gets longer?"

Incidentally, if I have never made my opinion on the matter clear, I think the British way of handling final punctuation and quotation marks is superior to the American way; however, I used the American style here. I don't think I have it in me to be a grammatical expat, though. While I prefer British punctuation, British spelling is not my favourite. And while I do consider my self to hold a black belt in the English language, being able to pick and choose among grammar rules is the rightful territory of 10th-dan linguists, not myself.