Geek Confessions & Blasphemies

I honestly don't know if America specifically fell in love with dubstep or it's just it was the newest dance music style on the block when America decided it was ready to get interested in dance music.

PurEvil wrote:
ccesarano wrote:
duckilama wrote:

I really like my Zune and am dreading its impending demise.

+1.

+2. My wife bought a 30Gb zune back when they were going out of favor for $40 from a coworker. This thing is tough, and does exactly what I want it to do... just hold my audiobooks, and not be a PITA to put media on (like my son's ipod touch).

I will be incredibly sad when the day comes that my HD bites it. It's been dropped on concrete floors, on stairs, sat on, had my laptop dropped on top of it, and it still works perfectly and looks pretty much just like it did the day I bought it.

In the time I've owned it I know at least two people who've been through multiple iPods because they look at them wrong and the screen breaks

My Zune 30 died so I got a Zune HD. Both were great. The software really does podcasts right.

My sister somehow broke the Lock button on her HD, but she is the Grim Reaper of Electronics. If I had a better vocabulary I could likely make a pun of that somehow.

Shortly after the lock button on mine broke. But as I've had mine since Zune launched and it only just now broke this year (and that break was merely the lock button), well, these things are friggin' amazing. I dread the day it finally dies.

Also: too bad Xbox 360 couldn't be so awesome lolz amirite bro?

I'm in a similar situation. My last spare Zune bit the dust, and I didn't feel compelled to buy some refurbished one off an ebay seller as I've had mixed results dealing with them. I finally went to get an ipod and it's been a continual hassle ever since. For starters, the way itunes handles podcasts sucks hard, I hate how slowly I can fast forward on this thing, the equaliser settings are terrible. Also, tons of things that were really simple to do in the Zune software now is a multiple step process.

Granted, a lot of this is familiarity and I'ld probably be saying a lot of the same things if I went in the reverse order, and it's not like Microsoft isn't to blame for half-assing promotion for this line and then giving up when it wasn't a runaway success. But I feel kind of burnt that I basically had only one choice for a dedicated music player with a decent amount of hard drive space.

kuddles wrote:

Also, tons of things that were really simple to do in the Zune software now is a multiple step process.

Huh. That was one of the reasons why, when I was working at my campus computer store, I did a test run on both iPod and Zune and I just loved Zune's interface better. But that was also before the whole touch screen thing, and I've confessed to ignorance on that front as I have only watched other people use iPhones. Haven't even seen people using iPods much these days.

Is it really still that much of a pain?

My wife is continually arguing with iTunes about how it handles podcasts. I have no problems with Zune. Reverse chronological order 3 at a time sync all unplayed and partially played ? No problem. Oldest first one at a time? Easy. Zune podcast handling is super flexible and easy to set up on a per podcast basis, and it remembers where I am in every partially played podcast episode for all my podcasts across restarts and syncs. My wife's iPod forgets all her sh*t if she even mentions missing her Zune.

Maq wrote:

I honestly don't know if America specifically fell in love with dubstep or it's just it was the newest dance music style on the block when America decided it was ready to get interested in dance music.

Is America actually in love with it, or is it just a specific subset of youth culture that likes it? My own personal theory is that it's what some marketing people think "the young folks are all listening to."

I dig some DnB (especially remixes), but the stuff I hear in marketing campaigns is the same buzzzzzzz wubwubwub over and over again. That's cool for like a single song. But if this is the basis for an entire musical movement, then I guess I'm getting old.

But I can definitely support something more like this:

I don't like the parts in the Lord of the Rings movies where it is just Sam and Frodo. Boring.

karmajay wrote:

I don't like the parts in the Lord of the Rings movies where it is just Sam and Frodo. Boring.

The books, either.

Grenn wrote:
karmajay wrote:

I don't like the parts in the Lord of the Rings movies where it is just Sam and Frodo. Boring.

The books, either.

You are now dead to me sir.

kazooka wrote:

But I can definitely support something more like this:

Sounds like top-40 bubble gum. Boring. And the first dubstep video linked is too harsh and random to be music. Is there an intermediate, something with a melody that doesn't repeat but that isn't so random as to just be noise?

karmajay wrote:

I don't like the parts in the Lord of the Rings movies where it is just Sam and Frodo. Boring.

You clearly don't love a good romance. Hobbit-on-hobbit love is very moving.

trichy wrote:
karmajay wrote:

I don't like the parts in the Lord of the Rings movies where it is just Sam and Frodo. Boring.

You clearly don't love a good romance. Hobbit-on-hobbit love is very moving.

And thus, a future entry into Elysium's next "Questions of the Perverts" article is born.

Coolbeans wrote:
Grenn wrote:
karmajay wrote:

I don't like the parts in the Lord of the Rings movies where it is just Sam and Frodo. Boring.

The books, either.

You are now dead to me sir.

Yeah, karmajay, you're dead to coolbeans!

Grenn wrote:
Coolbeans wrote:
Grenn wrote:
karmajay wrote:

I don't like the parts in the Lord of the Rings movies where it is just Sam and Frodo. Boring.

The books, either.

You are now dead to me sir.

Yeah, karmajay, you're dead to coolbeans!

Who?

karmajay wrote:
Grenn wrote:
Coolbeans wrote:
Grenn wrote:
karmajay wrote:

I don't like the parts in the Lord of the Rings movies where it is just Sam and Frodo. Boring.

The books, either.

You are now dead to me sir.

Yeah, karmajay, you're dead to coolbeans!

Who?

Whatever, the Sam and Frodo sections are why I've made it through that whole trilogy ONCE. Everytime I try to read it again, I get back to Sam and Frodo humping it through Mordor with Gollumn and just think... buuuuuuuuuuuuuh. Maybe I'll read a history book, that'll be more interesting... then I read Ready Player One again, which I should mention in the Book Recommendation thread.

The LOTR trilogy is actually chock-full of references that you will never appreciate until you read the Silmarillion, the appendices, and the Tales books. Bree isn't just some town - it's a specific town in a specific location with a specific reason for why Strider is there at that point in time looking for hobbits.

When the hobbits and Strider travel through the moors seeing what they see, it makes a lot more sense and has a lot more suspense when you know where the Black Riders are, how close they came, and the arena they're doing it in. Weathertop is a hell of a backdrop to a fight between the followers of the Witch King and the last of the Dunedain Kings.

It's fairly bad at making the significance of these things known within the book itself.

LarryC wrote:

The LOTR trilogy is actually chock-full of references that you will never appreciate until you read the Silmarillion, the appendices, and the Tales books. Bree isn't just some town - it's a specific town in a specific location with a specific reason for why Strider is there at that point in time looking for hobbits.

When the hobbits and Strider travel through the moors seeing what they see, it makes a lot more sense and has a lot more suspense when you know where the Black Riders are, how close they came, and the arena they're doing it in. Weathertop is a hell of a backdrop to a fight between the followers of the Witch King and the last of the Dunedain Kings.

It's fairly bad at making the significance of these things known within the book itself.

To add to this, for anyone who doesn't know, the reason for that is that Tolkien intended the Silmarillion to be the first part of The Lord of the Rings. That's right: page one of LOTR wasn't going to be Bilbo's 111th birthday—it was going to be the Ainulindalë; then 300 pages of a few thousand years of Elven and Númenórean history—told from the Elven point of view in Elven style—then, if you, fresh off The Hobbit survived that, a switch back to hobbit perspective and Bilbo et al.

JRRT was rightly persuaded to separate Sil to be published at an indefinite future time. The specifically LOTR-relevant highlights were then filed in the Appendices.

Gravey wrote:
LarryC wrote:

The LOTR trilogy is actually chock-full of references that you will never appreciate until you read the Silmarillion, the appendices, and the Tales books. Bree isn't just some town - it's a specific town in a specific location with a specific reason for why Strider is there at that point in time looking for hobbits.

When the hobbits and Strider travel through the moors seeing what they see, it makes a lot more sense and has a lot more suspense when you know where the Black Riders are, how close they came, and the arena they're doing it in. Weathertop is a hell of a backdrop to a fight between the followers of the Witch King and the last of the Dunedain Kings.

It's fairly bad at making the significance of these things known within the book itself.

To add to this, for anyone who doesn't know, the reason for that is that Tolkien intended the Silmarillion to be the first part of The Lord of the Rings. That's right: page one of LOTR wasn't going to be Bilbo's 111th birthday—it was going to be the Ainulindalë; then 300 pages of a few thousand years of Elven and Númenórean history—told from the Elven point of view in Elven style—then, if you, fresh off The Hobbit survived that, a switch back to hobbit perspective and Bilbo et al.

JRRT was rightly persuaded to separate Sil to be published at an indefinite future time. The specifically LOTR-relevant highlights were then filed in the Appendices.

Despite numerous attempts, I have never been able to read anything by JRRT other than LotR and The Hobbit. I have tried the others, and I rapidly get the feeling that I am reading an encyclopedia.

mudbunny wrote:

Despite numerous attempts, I have never been able to read anything by JRRT other than LotR and The Hobbit. I have tried the others, and I rapidly get the feeling that I am reading an encyclopedia.

You are not alone. Which is why JRRT's publisher was so very right in his thinking.

That said, I felt the same way for years, finally revisited Sil this year—and was completely sucked in from the word go. It got confusing at times, for sure (wait, who's he again? The father, or the nephew, or was he an Elf?), but I didn't get that "encyclopedia" feeling anymore. I rolled with it—short stories in a high prose—and it was an immensely satisfying read that deepened the background and profundity of JRRT's mythology immeasurably. Like LarryC says, its main benefit is making LOTR itself that much more meaningful. I do recommend taking another crack at it sometime.

I've had trouble reading the Silmarillion which I think is kind of odd because I really liked the appendices to LOTR.

LarryC wrote:

It's one of those things that needs a "translation codex" in your head.

Also Wikipedia at your fingertips: Tolkien loves giving his characters multiple names.

Also also, I forgot to mention: what really helped me with finally reading Sil was the Tolkien Professor podcast. Read along with the nine-part lecture (or the 35-part seminar series).

LarryC speaks truth. As I recall, in an appendix, Gandalf basically says that the entire reason he gave the key to Thorin was because he was worried that if Sauron did, indeed, return that Smaug would be too great an asset for Sauron to use. The entire book was just one brilliant chess gambit by Gandalf. There's a reason he refers to himself as the Foe of the Enemy.

MrAndrewJ wrote:

Mimble, I was also pretty much undatable for also having the audacity to prefer getting to know someone. I also looked like a metal head during high school, to further throw everyone off.

I didn't men to be bitter earlier. That's not my preferred state.

Also, I love Terry Goodkind, have the entire Sword of Truth series in hardcover, and a few them are autographed. I like his novels much, much more than Jordan's.

Heh, I hung out with some of the metal heads in high school (though, mostly the freaky goth kids, and those artsy types drawing very cool looking dragons on their binders in Bic pen).

If you're a little bitter about taking crap for wanting to be yourself, well, I can hardly fault you for that. I've had some bitter moments, but mostly am glad that high school is over and I never have to go back.

Confession: I have never actually finished The Hobbit. I know what happens, and I think I've read almost all the words, but I've never just read it cover to cover without giving up due to sleepiness. *gives up whatever 'nerd' cred was accumulated thus far*

To be fair, a lot of books are like that, and it seems like me and my bibliophile wife are unusual in that we can store "translation codices" in our heads for particular book types. I never finished any Jane Austen book until I understood both what she was saying and what she wasn't saying in the written word. After that, all her books revealed themselves to be both irreverently funny, and surprisingly salacious. Girl's got a naughty sense of humor.

And I'll be turning in my man card now. Good thing I still have my nerd cred. *looks around nervously*

LarryC wrote:

And I'll be turning in my man card now.

Rubbish. Anyone who suggests you should turn in your man card for reading Austen immediately forfeits his.

LarryC wrote:

To be fair, a lot of books are like that, and it seems like me and my bibliophile wife are unusual in that we can store "translation codices" in our heads for particular book types. I never finished any Jane Austen book until I understood both what she was saying and what she wasn't saying in the written word. After that, all her books revealed themselves to be both irreverently funny, and surprisingly salacious. Girl's got a naughty sense of humor.

And I'll be turning in my man card now. Good thing I still have my nerd cred. *looks around nervously*

If you have to justify it, say you were gearing up for Pride & Prejudice & Zombies. Then present them with a fist and tell them to "knuck up." When they present their fist, collide yours with theirs and forever after refer to that man as "bro." Take the "brewskie" that they offer you, point to a random corner of the room and tell them that there is a "super fine honey" you want to "mack on" over there. Then get the hell out of there and back on the internet where you belong.

This thread dried up?
I'm only reading the hobbit now because of the movie. I skipped it when I read the trilogy as a teen.

I never read the songs and poems in fantasy novel. They just don't thrill me. I've never felt like it detracted from the book.

Ghostship wrote:

This thread dried up?

My dumb jokes have killed many a thread.