The last time I saw the last one it was at an AFI screening with Peter Jackson, Fran Walsh, Phillippa Boyens, Barrie Osborne and the head guy at New Line. Even though the QA was very interesting, this was the third or fourth time I’d seen it and by the end my brains were dribbling out my ears.

I didn’t *want* to watch them multiple times, I just had lots of friends who wanted to see it with me and I wanted to see it with them.  I think those movies killed my decades-long tradition of seeing movies at midnight showings the day before.

As for titles that will nab Google’s attention, at least a good quarter of Trollsmyth: the Blog’s traffic is derived from one post entitled “Succubus Porn”. Which doesn’t disturb me nearly so much as the trickle of traffic I derive from one titled “Walrus Porn”.

- Brian

I often read books and never form explicit notions of what the characters faces look like. When I write, I tend to “cast” the characters as known actors so I can cheat and describe that actor’s face in detail, and avoid creating it myself.

I sometimes wonder what it must like to be an artist and wonder whether they DO created detailed versions of otherwise vaguely described characters, or whether the act of drawing the picture for the first time IS the act of taking the vague collection of feelings and impressions and carving a face out of them.

I’m sure it’s actually quite normal for people to focus their imagination on different, specific qualities in the characters they read about.

To keep things fun, I also registered http://www.fakegsk.com as a more Geoff friendly way to get to my own website. Along those lines, I guess http://www.kasualcomunist.com would work for the whole communism url debacle.

So Ian McKellen is my Gandalf since the movies are my LotR (and I think they’re too long too). But! Strictly speaking, My Ian McKellen is subtly different from your Ian McKellen who is again subtly different from everyone else’s. So it’s all good. ;~)