#408

Work

I took this week off work.

Books

This week I read:

• The Fellowship of the Ring by J. R. R. Tolkien

  Hot on the heels of The Hobbit, I decided to re-read the rest of LotR, and wow there’s a lot which is slightly different to the film that I’d forgotten. The film is a very good adaptation, in my opinion, and does hit a lot of the major points of the book. And there are major differences everyone knows about, like shortening the time between the Birthday Party and Frodo leaving the Shire, or totally omitting Tom Bombadill and the Barrow-Downs, but there are also many other differences that I’d forgotten.

  In some cases the order of events is slightly different, compressed or rearranged in the film for timing reasons, but sometimes it’s pretty big. Moria in particular is quite different: Gandalf was the one who proposed going through Moria (Caradhras was Aragorn’s idea), and Pippin throws a rock down the well quite early in their journey with the goblins only showing up days later. Aragorn gets Anduril when they set off from Rivendell, and there’s a lot less tension between him and Boromir. Gimli is much less comic relief, Legolas jokes more. Some major scenes are covered incredibly briefly too, the entire fight on Weathertop is only a couple of paragraphs; and yet we get pages upon pages of walking.

Roleplaying Games

I was visiting friends this weekend, and we played a bunch of different games: Astroprisma, Doom Pilgrim, Morkin, Old School Essentials, and Song of the Scryptwyrm. I don’t often get to play games in person, so it’s nice to do that from time to time.

Miscellaneous

I took the week off work, and spent it largely just lazing around, sleeping in, and playing games. I visited friends at the weekend, but got trapped and had to stay another day as there was a fire which shut down the train lines to Peterborough; a bit awkward as I didn’t really have any way of contacting work (I emailed my manager from my personal email, but I’d forgotten that he’s actually off this week so he wouldn’t have seen that anyway), but thankfully didn’t turn into a problem.