The Hall of Fire

I agree with yov. The first question is whether a work of fiction designed for entertainment can draw on real history? I think most people would agree the answer is “yes”. The second is, are there aspects of history which are so terrible that they should not be used in entertainment? Here, I think ...

While I understand this line of thinking, I disagree with him at a very, very fundamental level. It reminds me of people who roll their eyes at people who think that LOTR can explore meaningful, important ideas. Plenty of people dismiss it as "just" fantasy, much like he is dismissing the...

Interestingly, I actually thought the way X-Men films handled the Holocaust was an example of the right way to incorporate a real tragedy into a superhero story. Magneto is caught up in the Holocaust as a teenager and is powerless to do anything about it, and so in my view it doesn’t come across as...

Túrin Turambar wrote:(...) against the truly absurd sub-plot of Erich Ludendorff turning into a supervillain.

Wait, what? The stupidity of this genre is truly dumbfounding. That said, in my book nothing beats the crass exploitation of the Shoa in the X-Men films.

Except the polls underestimated Macron's support by more than 10 points. It was a worse miss than Brexit or Trump, they just happened to get the winner right. That is wrong. Most early May polls predicted that Macron would earn slightly above 60 per cent of the vote. So yes, most polls underestimat...

In many ways, the best historical analogy to ISIS would probably be the crusaders, who also sought to impose a religious tyranny on the entire known world. Sent from my VS985 4G using Tapatalk I realize that this is a rather popular analogy but it has some issues. From a historical perspective, mos...

This might be a rather ancillary and digressive post but this thread reminded me of a university exam I took last year on Irish history where I had to focus on two time periods in my studies and chose the early Irish church (1) and the Irish War of Independence (2). During my studies, I frantically ...

Sports broadcasts are an altogether different medium and experience that often require a modicum of active emotional investment. When I go to a bar to watch a football game, I go there partly for the collective experience (same goes for watching a game live in a stadium). When I buy a movie ticket, ...

Lali: I hope your best friend's brother can make a full physical recovery and that his psychological scars will not be too great. A quick google search seems to reveal some positive news for T.: http://fox2now.com/2016/11/23/officer-shot-last-sunday-helps-open-30th-annual-guns-n-hoses/ Lali, if you ...

Thank you for the link, Sunsilver. Several of my family members have been in deep mourning over Leonard Cohen’s death. For my father, my aunt (his sister), and my eldest cousin (her daughter) the music of Cohen was an integral part of their own lives. My dad’s favorite song is “Famous Blue Raincoat”...

If you are interested, a Facebook study on the US presidential election:

http://blog.storyclash.com/analysis-of- ... tion-2016/

PS: It should be pointed out that I know one the authors.

Very OT: You guys realize that the MBTI is not proper psychological science, right? ^^

https://www.theguardian.com/science/bra ... scientific
http://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-echochambers-28315137
http://indiana.edu/~jobtalk/Articles/develop/mbti.pdf

But - I did fall in love with The Simpsons pretty much from minute one. It landed when I was seven or eight years old and I watched it religiously until it got crappy 10 or so years later so I pretty much grew up with it. I have never been a fan of The Simpsons but the difference in quality between...

Is is my understanding that Túrin did not say in his post that the First Industrial Revolution caused a net reduction of jobs but that particular technological innovations lead to a reduction in the demand for certain jobs, which was for example undoubtedly true for certain sectors in the Industrial...

Frelga wrote:

yovargas wrote:What's Russian for schadenfreude?

Злорадство

And there I was, thinking it was шаденфроеде. ^^

Dear Halofirians, Thank you all for your sound advice. My brother and I shall get the tickets on Thursday; hopefully they still have some of the premium seats right in front of the stage. @Alatar: Sadly, there will only be one showing - so my finances will not deteriorate. @Jude: That sounds wonderf...

Hope this fits in here: So there is going to be a showing/concert of The Fellowship of the Ring in my home city next April (http://lordoftheringsinconcert.com/). I was wondering if anyone here has already been to such a show and could share his/her impressions with me. The tickets are a tad expensiv...

Peter Jackson weighs in: Erdoğan's 'Gollum insult' a mistake, says Lord of the Rings director Tolkien film-maker Peter Jackson says images, which led to trial of Bilgin Çiftçi, depict only benign character Sméagol http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/dec/03/lord-of-rings-director-insult-to-erdogan-...

I guess this fits in here :scratch: : A Turkish court wants an expert examination of Gollum’s character for a bizarre case involving President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/turkey/12028461/Lord-of-the-Rings-experts-to-assess-character-of-Gollum-for-Turkish-ju...

I am really looking forward to getting the "The Hobbit Trilogy - Extended Edition" set: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Hobbit-Trilogy-Extended-Blu-ray-Region/dp/B00ZX1Y7O6/ref=sr_1_1?s=dvd&ie=UTF8&qid=1445733524&sr=1-1&keywords=the+hobbit+extended+edition+trilogy My brother and I ...