The Hobbit

First off all: check out the announcement below if you have any interest in Magic: the Gathering! Second off all: yeah, I'm late to the party. I only saw the Hobbit yesterday. Still, I'd like to take a moment to write something about the movie, and how it could've been better. Because while I didn't feel like I had wasted my money, that's about as high a praise I can give it. Entertaining schlock, but the more I think about it the more problems I see.

Let's start with the start of the movie: who on earth thought it would be a good idea to kill of Smaug five minutes into the movie? Yeah, I know the book also has him killed of out of nowhere by a recently introduced character, but it sucked in the book as well. You're building up the meeting with this dragon for the entire book, and then you have him killed off by a random, recently introduced character, only to introduce an out-of-nowhere clash of armies as your climax? As much as I liked that battle in the book, the way Tolkien dealt with Smaug felt stupid and anticlimactic even the first time I read the book. When I was 10.

Announcing: Multiverse in Review

Have I made any New Years resolutions? Well, I've just embarked on quite a big project, so just the one: keep working on Multiverse in Review! What is that you ask? Well, if you're into Magic the Gathering, especially if you're into the storyline, it is a sister blog to Be Nerd that you really should check out! On it I will attempt to review every single story in the MTG canon. Each entry will get a summary and review, and I'll figure out how everything in this huge, sometimes chaotic, franchise fits together. As a nerd and historian I am a huge fan of projects like this, from Fnord12's attempt to put all Marvel comics in the correct order to the TMNT chronology or the Doctor Who chronology. For the longest time I've wanted to start a project like it myself, and since I've recently completed my collection of Magic novels (well, some are still in transit, but once they have been delivered...), this seemed like a golden opportunity.

This will mean that from now on a weekly update on MiR is my main priority, and Be Nerd will get updates more sporadically. My apologies to the non-Magic fans out there. Luckily I hadn't build much of a reader base for this private project yet! Still, I won't abandon this blog altogether. Sometimes I still need to vent my opinions on a comic or movie, and then there'll always be this blog.