The Start Of Mjolnir's Handle. My Phone Takes Crappy Pictures But Trust Me, It Looks Better In Person

Up and coming

May 18th- Crawfish fest

May 25th- Tahoe race fundraiser

June 2nd- 100 bike race in Lake Tahoe

June 14th- Camping in southern Illinois

June 15th- Our second Warrior Dash

Let the season begin. Can't wait.

-Jake

Afternoon nap time.

One year down, a lifetime to go.

Warrior dash 2013, our second year in a row and it sure wont be our last.

Today my girlfriend and I discovered a bouldering gym hidden on the forth floor of an abandoned building in the warehouse district. Awesome Saturday.

If only I had the money to keep it

Beorn the skin changer

I have long been a fan of the LOTR books with the Hobbit being my favorite. I think it's because I read it at a young age and t was able to make a nice impact on my imagination. Anyways I was excited when I heard about the Hobbit movies and couldn't wait to see one of my favorite minor characters, Beorn, on the big screen.

Needless to say I was disappointed.

Not only did they skip over the chance to lead nicely into the film with some down time at Beorn's house which would have allowed them to reestablish the plot prepare everyone for the events that would later happen in the movie, but they also cut down the content from the book drastically. Why go into the appendices and pull out extra information to help extend film time and then cut short scenes that are actually in the book  itself.

I don't want to be totally negative about the movie, it did have some great parts and as always the people at Weta did a fantastic job with the set, props and design work. However, I recently got a chance to look through the "Desolation of Smaug" design book that is out on the market (available on amazon below).

http://amzn.com/0062265695

All I can say after looking at all the designs made for the Beorn character is that they picked the wrong one. There were some truely fantastic concept ideas that were much more closely related to the book's description. Understandably you want the dwarves to look distinctly different so that you can tell the 13 of them apart, but there is no way anyone could mistake the giant Beorn for a tiny dwarf, so why try to make him look like one? Luckily the got all 30 seconds of screen time for his bear form right at least.