Recent content by Dioltach

Guards! Guards! has a bit about wanting a king again instead of the Patrician, because of the old glory days. That idea gets pretty short shrift. As for other fantasy books that don't glorify the past: Shannara (where the past is truly grim), the Gentlemen Bastards (where there's not much...

Does Conan the Barbarian/Conan the Destroyer/Red Sonja count?

Blackadder II, Blackadder the Third, Blackadder Goes Forth.

Ged, Gandalf, Raistlin and Dallben.

This looks good! The first Legends anthology that featured "The Hedge Knight" was published in 1998. Those years weigh heavily on my knees.

It's the closest thing I've ever read to how my group plays D&D.

Somewhere in Scotland there was a grave marked "Little John". I can't remember exactly when it was - somewhere I might have photocopy of the research I did at university - but I think it was in the late Middle Ages when they opened the grave. The skeleton was of someone with dwarfism, but...

Maid Marian wasn't originally part of the Robin Hood stories. She comes from the tradition of French pastoral poetry about the shepherd Robin and the country lass Marian. When those works crossed over to England, "Robin" became confused with Robin from the Robin Hood legends, and so Robin Hood...

I like the AT-AT's crossing the mountain pass, but this trailer could easily be a collection of scenes from a new season of The Mandalorian. I'm still going to watch it, of course.

Do I go back to it again and again? Do I still enjoy it all those times, for reasons other than nostalgia and/or comfort reading/watching/playing? Books like LotR, Jeeves & Wooster and Earthsea, movies like The Good, the Bad & the Ugly, Casablanca and the LotR trilogy, games like Planescape...

I always thought the "Clone Wars" thing in the prequels was a huge miss. I'm pretty sure the mention in Ep. 4 was just a throw-away line: "You served my father during the Clone Wars." Sounds cool and mysterious, and in a few words implies a vast history. But here's the thing. The clones fought...

Here's something else that most people don't know about JRR Tolkien: the J stands for "Jive".

Have you listened to the audiobooks of LotR as read by Andy Serkis? He brings the dialogue to life.

I recently read one of the new Conan books, and was struck by something similar. Conan takes beating after beating, but in between each he miraculously heals. He starts each phase of the fight as fresh as a daisy. It annoyed me, because one thing I enjoy about sword & sorcery is the grittiness...

I bet the people on that overpass were glad it happened when it did, and not a few more metres along.