It's Been Waaaay Too Long Since I've Done Any Rock Climbing At All. I Really Want To Go Soon But Am Kinda

Back porch gardening.

The start of mjolnir's handle. My phone takes crappy pictures but trust me, it looks better in person :)

Allison hates pretty much every picture taken of her but I thought there needed to be one up of her and Turdie. Especially one of the two of them just relaxin' in our apartment.

-J

The joys of traveling.

I'm very excited. Just reached the highest page count for anything I've ever written!

127 pages to be exact :)

Some of the progress and parts to a lord of the rings replica axe I'm making on my patreon page. Check it out through the link below! https://www.patreon.com/jlinneprops

Beorn the skin changer

I have long been a fan of the LOTR books with the Hobbit being my favorite. I think it's because I read it at a young age and t was able to make a nice impact on my imagination. Anyways I was excited when I heard about the Hobbit movies and couldn't wait to see one of my favorite minor characters, Beorn, on the big screen.

Needless to say I was disappointed.

Not only did they skip over the chance to lead nicely into the film with some down time at Beorn's house which would have allowed them to reestablish the plot prepare everyone for the events that would later happen in the movie, but they also cut down the content from the book drastically. Why go into the appendices and pull out extra information to help extend film time and then cut short scenes that are actually in the book  itself.

I don't want to be totally negative about the movie, it did have some great parts and as always the people at Weta did a fantastic job with the set, props and design work. However, I recently got a chance to look through the "Desolation of Smaug" design book that is out on the market (available on amazon below).

http://amzn.com/0062265695

All I can say after looking at all the designs made for the Beorn character is that they picked the wrong one. There were some truely fantastic concept ideas that were much more closely related to the book's description. Understandably you want the dwarves to look distinctly different so that you can tell the 13 of them apart, but there is no way anyone could mistake the giant Beorn for a tiny dwarf, so why try to make him look like one? Luckily the got all 30 seconds of screen time for his bear form right at least.

Into the Fall

Last weekend Allison and I took a trip with friends up to Wisconsin for our last fall adventure before it got too damn cold. As usual it was so magically perfect that I had trouble coming back to the city.