There are so many things we have today which were almost beyond imagination in the past. This has been particularly brought home to me this week as I'm making a few trips to our county town (more than 100 miles away), and because we lost the internet which brings home just home much we use it! Technology certainly has its benefits! In fact, looking around the room (and this is a comparatively old-fashioned room) as I'm writing this, there are so many things we take for granted which would simply not have existed even a couple of hundred years ago. You can, of course, discount anything which uses electricity and, more interestingly, all of the paperback books - of which there are hundreds - and none of the MDF bookcases either. There would have been no photographs, although there may well have been paintings and sketches of the people in them. But it's not just about taking away what is here now. It's also about what we have lost since then. Rooms needed lighting, and th...
Yesterday was Lord of the Rings Day. Every January, we sit down for an entire day and watch the three Lord of the Rings films back-to-back. And that's the extended versions. It's a perfect way to spend a January Saturday, when Christmas is over and before the gardening season truly begins and you feel bad for being inside! I thought yesterday, as I was crying at the Fellowship of the Ring, that I would do a blog post about Boromir and how he's actually a pretty awesome character. Then I thought, when I opened Blogger to write, that all of the Fellowship play important roles, and there's someone there who would appeal to everyone. So, in this 9 part series on characters, let's take each of the Fellowship and discuss the role they play in the story. What's their character arc? What's their purpose? You never know - it might teach us a thing or two about designing our own characters. WARNING: This contains spoilers. Obviously! The first one we're going to ...