This post is several days after the fact, but I kind of needed several days to ruminate on what this episode dropped on us!
Spoilers behind the fold.
Continue reading “The Rings of Power 1.3: Adar”Where Anna the Piper geeks out
This post is several days after the fact, but I kind of needed several days to ruminate on what this episode dropped on us!
Spoilers behind the fold.
Continue reading “The Rings of Power 1.3: Adar”Since episodes 1 and 2 of Rings of Power were released simultaneously last week, we watched the first one on Saturday night and the second one Sunday. I continue to be intrigued!
Invoke the appropriate ancient dwarven rite to access the spoilers beyond the fold.
Continue reading “The Rings of Power 1.2: Adrift”My household watched the first episode of The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power tonight. Spoiler-free picoreview: I liked it!
Fair warning to my fellow Tolkien nerds, particularly if you know anything about The Silmarillion: yes, it is absolutely taking liberties with the way events played out from the First Age leading into the Second, particularly in regards to Galadriel.
However, it’s taking liberties in ways that so far I don’t actually mind. It’s helped that I very deliberately set my expectations here to “very pretty, very expensive Tolkien fanfic”, to give myself permission to not be bugged by any discrepancies between this story and what Tolkien actually wrote.
It also helps a lot for me to keep in mind the quote out of Tolkien’s own letters, about how his vision for Middle-Earth was as a mythic milieu with room for stories by other creators. The key word here being myth.
If you know anything about Greek mythology, you’ll know that that entire mythos contradicts itself all over the place. And with that in the back of my brain to establish precedent, I’m pretty at peace with the idea of other Middle-Earth stories contradicting Tolkien’s canon… as long as they hold true to the spirit of what Tolkien wrote, and do not actively break the world.
So far, as of episode 1, they do not appear to have done so. So far, so good. We’ll see how this holds up as we proceed through season 1!
Some spoilers behind the fold!
Continue reading “The Rings of Power 1.1: A Shadow of the Past”Y’all have probably noticed that the vast majority of my blogging activity lately has been all about the Skyrim. Still though I do periodically try to remember that I need to beat down my email queue, and also get caught up on things like “which new ebooks do I need to make sure and pull into Calibre?”
So here’s a roundup of ebook activity over the last several months, since today is a “beat down the email queue” kind of day.
Acquired from Project Gutenberg:
Pre-ordered from Kobo:
And acquired from Kobo:
Nabbed from Kobo and Amazon explicitly on the strength of various reviews by James Nicoll:
Previous pre-order from Kobo that showed up:
Acquired from Amazon:
Pre-ordered from Amazon:
52 for the year.
Another overdue ebook roundup post. Here are titles I’ve picked up over the last few months.
Acquired from Kobo:
Pre-orders that showed up from Kobo:
Pre-order placed with Kobo:
23 so far for the year.
Now that the house net is back up and stable again, and I’m on a three-day weekend where I don’t have to worry about things being on fire at the day job, I have the time to dig back through my inbox and get caught up on tallying my ebook purchases!
This post will cover the tail end of 2021’s purchases and also lay down the initial ones for 2022.
Purchased from Kobo in 2021:
Purchased from Kobo in 2022:
Purchased from Amazon in 2022:
79 total for 2021. 6 so far for 2022.
Took a backhoe to my gigantic email backlog yesterday, and that included dealing with receipts from assorted ebook purchases and getting those files incorporated into my Calibre library! Here now are those books, rounded up.
Acquired from Kobo:
Pre-orders that showed up:
68 for the year.
Main interesting discovery for me in this practice ties back to a thing I discussed with Lisa on my last official lesson, when we played around with La fée des dents and discussed what it does to the tune stylistically, if you start on a down bow vs. an up bow.
I tried the same thing in this practice with the tune Feller from Fortune, focusing on the A part and seeing what it felt like to start on a down bow vs. an up bow. Here, as with La fée des dents, I was intrigued to find that starting on an up bow “felt” easier. More natural. I’m still working on trying to articulate why I get that feeling.
There are several interesting questions to consider here:
In “Anna remembers she really needs to practice the instrument” news, here’s today’s fiddle practice report!
I haven’t tried to play André Brunet’s lovely La fée des dents in a while, so it was a pleasure to revisit it today.
This is one of the tunes that you definitely want to play in a nice flowing kind of way. Figuring out where to put some slurs seems like my primary tool for encouraging that… though I also need to keep in mind that there are questions here of just how smoothly I change fingerings and change bow direction, too.
But that said I did begin to identify some spots in both the A part and the B part where I could add some of that sense of flow, for lack of a better word. By which I mean, some spots where I could put in a few short slurs.
Mostly though I wanted to review the tune and remind myself of the fingerings necessary for it. And I’ll look forward to working with this one some more!
Ten minutes
Ciel d’automne
Decided to switch it up a bit today and jump over to one of my favorite Andre Brunet tunes, Ciel d’automne. Mostly I played with reviewing the A part, because it’d been a while since I last touched this tune.
But I also wanted to experiment with placing slurs in it, to build on what I’ve been learning playing around with Blarney Pilgrim and Feller from Fortune. Ciel d’automne is a very strong example of what I mean when I talk about needing to master how to make a tune just flow, this thing is gorgeous and it needs to have that liquid feel to it.
I didn’t work out slur patterns for all of the A part yet, but I did get a good way into that section of the tune for that!
I also have aspirations of figuring out where double stops could go in this thing. I tried a couple of places, but that didn’t work very well. I think I need to listen to the recording I have of the tune some more and see if I can figure out how Andre did it!
(Oh darn oh darn whatever shall I do, etc. :D)