I have been terrible at updating this site, and in being creatively generally, not only since the start of this year, this new decade, but a little while before. I’m not sure I believe in writer’s block exactly, it sounds like an excuse, but I’ve certainly had a dearth of creative output. Well, I’ve been writing my dissertation, but that’s only been here and there. No, I just haven’t been inspired for a while, and I’ve been busy, well, busyish. What have I been doing? I’m currently addicted to two games for a start: Forza Motorsport 3 and Dragon Age: Origins. The first is, as the name implies, a car game. I’m not even that into cars, a few months ago I couldn’t tell an R8 from a Veyron, a Dino from a Testarossa, but somehow I’ve been addicting to driving around in virtual sports cars, and it’s time-consuming. The second of those games is an epic fantasy game of the really geeky sort, with elves and dwarves and mages and such. I wouldn’t say I’m a fan of that sort of thing, though I like the Lord of the Rings movies, but it’s such a well-made game that can’t help but love it. Girlfriends take up time too, but I can hardly complain about that.

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I just watched the extended version of The Two Towers, having watched The Fellowship of the Ring last Saturday. If nothing else, those films are epic. Really, the sheer scale of them is immense, and the cohesiveness of all the elements, any one of which could so easily be rendered ridiculous through cliche or insincerity, is nothing short of a marvel. Of course, by now, you’ve probably either seen the films or have no interest in seeing them, and, either way, have a firm opinion of them which I am unlikely to change, and have no desire to.

For my part, I’d kind of forgotten how good they were. Though each of the extended films runs to around two-hundred minutes, just twenty minutes shorter than Sergione Leone’s Once Upon a Time in America, a masterpiece which I have the utmost respect for, the Lord of the Rings films do not seem to last nearly as long: with Once Upon a Time in America, admittedly an emotionally draining film, you feel like you’ve been there a long time, a life-time in fact; but with Lord of the Rings, time seems to disappear.

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