niktemadur

Who cares? They are sewer stench, and should be dealt with accordingly.

Live long and proosper!

Inspiration does come... but it has to find you working.

Rude people have always been around the moviegoing "experience".
Then cellphones and social media popped up, making things geometrically worse.
Then in order to not inconvenience the mindless assholes inside their theaters, they managed to run the real movie lovers out of their establishments.

Then somehow, incredibly, the pandemic made things even worse! Like something about being alone with their hollow lives for a year or two, broke something in the hollow psyche of those already mindless, rude hordes.

There was one time in 2007 that blew my mind in a movie theater, they were screening a limited engagement of No Country For Old Men before general release, so everyone who was there, was there for the love of cinema.
There is no music soundtrack in that movie, it has long stretches of silence, and in each of those scenes, in this packed large old movie house, I swear you could hear a pin drop.
My god... what an exceptional movie experience that night was, I'd never experienced anything quite like it, before or since.

putin and stalin - and every alcoholic below them on the hierarchy - equally incompetent, just as inhumane and idiotic in their views on life and the world, having brutalized and/or persecuted the intelligent people out of their right wing society, then scratching their heads as to why their infernal machinery crumbles.

This is why russia remains firmly stuck in the 19th goddamned century.

But physics turns out to NOT be a smooth gradient, there are steps, aka quanta, that's why they call it quantum physics or quantum mechanics, quantum electrodynamics and quantum chromodynamics.

At certain steps - not every step, but at certain mathematically defined points - thresholds are crossed and things behave differently, more energetic or complex phenomena emerge.

You joke, but it's still a valid way of doing it.

If we are going be inquisitive in a systematic manner, we have to measure things in comparison, and to start doing that we had to start somewhere, in every single different field. Eventually we got to the speed of light as a constant, figured out the 1/137 fine structure constant, the helical configuration of DNA and RNA, etc., all starting from arbitrary suppositions, getting honed and adjusted by laboratory and thought experiments.

But has he heard of Isildur and his bane?
Bane... Brisbane?

Naturally artificial... artificially natural?
Sounds like something Nestle might try and get away with in the package labelling.

Chinese writing is a vast world of art and ideas, with probably over 30 thousand different characters, nobody knows for sure how many there are. Not knowing what a character is, to strip it of meaning or cultural baggage, kind of frees one up to appreciate the rhythm and delicate balance of lines as their own thing.
Then again, you do not want to end up with PIG SWAMP MOUNTAIN DWARF NOODLE in permanent ink on your skin.

If you want to see Ewan McGregor naked and his body covered in Chinese calligraphy, sometime between Trainspotting and Star Wars, do check out Peter Greenaway's bonkers visual masterpiece The Pillow Book.

Then as it turns out, a current tech challenge in astronomy concerning gravitational waves, is to parse them through a detector analogous to a prism, to break these waves up into component parts, not unlike a gravitational rainbow.

So it turns out to be not just a poetic flight of fancy, it may describe something that might actually exist. The Universe is always stranger and more wondrous that we can imagine at any given point in time.

translations of bronze and iron age holy texts

Wait, what do you mean by that? I know Tolkien borrowed a lot from old texts like the Norse and Icelandic sagas, but I have read only the four popular Middle Earth books, and have dipped up to my ankles in Icelandic sagas, so that's as much as I can say for certain.

There's also Beowulf - of which I have read a version, a translation - and the myth of Arthur and Camelot, what I know is what I've seen in Excalibur, which is one of my all-time favorite movies, in my personal Top Twenty to be sure.

But Bronze Age and Iron Age? To put the history of Middle Earth in these terms is blowing my mind a little bit over here, as I have only recently understood the differences between these two surprisingly different eras.

Ancient was ancient and it was all one blurry smudge of names and land and years counted in negative numbers. Then I started to delve a little bit, particularly on YouTube, and it's like the past popped into 3D and in color, in my mind, to suddenly understand the difference between Sumerian and Akkadian, or between the Medic and the Punic wars.

And frankly, I find the Bronze Age to be much more fascinating and compelling, the first great spurt of civilization, suddenly finding itself with time for organized contemplation for the first time, as well as that most astonishing of inventions - writing, allowing the arts, engineering, infrastructure, sciences, etc. to flourish.

The old Greeks themselves codified this concept into their mythologies:
Kronos (Time) + Mnemosyne (Memory) = The Muses (the inspirations of man).
When that memory got transferred to clay tablets or papyrus scrolls, the curve of knowledge started going exponential, more knowledge in ever shorter cycles.

To now realize that there is a similar level of depth perspective in the Silmarillion, is making Middle Earth pop a bit in 3D and in color in my head.