A Warm Day In Chicago Is Best Spent On A Frozen Dog Beach!

One year down, a lifetime to go.

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

127 pages to be exact :)

Thor's hammer is finally done. It weighs a considerable amount, but couldn't be happier with it!

Does anyone know how to block fake users from following your blog? I’ve got a bunch of followers suddenly that are nothing but blogs filled with advertisements (usually porn sites) and I’m sick of it.

Watching my life collapse in on itself in real time is different from how I imagined it.

Sketches of pages 1 & 2 by Thad Stalmack. Part of Nomad Anthology series

Every time I feel like my apartment is cluttered and over stuffed with possessions I just want to fit as much as I can, of what I want to keep, into a suitcase.

Sell the rest.

Hike into the wilderness.

Build a house (a treehouse would be cool).

And live there, away from it all, until I die.

I'm always secretly hoping that the lease on our apartment will end, Allison and I will lose or quit our jobs and that she'll finally get the desire to run away with me. I hope that would all at the same time.

It's the perfect recipe to just pack up and drive.

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.