I’m always here.
/whisper magnus
A-A-Again?
unless you want to out this publicly then yes
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It’s fine M.
I’ll be here to support you in case Lady Ale hurts you
Blackmail?
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/Accept
worth a shot lol
There’s a scene in the movie The Hobbit II: The Desolation of Smaug which Tolkien did not put into the original book.
The movie version goes like this: The thirteen dwarves and Bilbo Baggins have just spent one and a half movies fighting their way to the place where Thorin, leader of the dwarves, expects to find a secret entrance into the lost dwarven kingdom of Erebor. This entrance can only be opened on a particular day of the year (Durin’s Day), and they have a decoded map saying, Stand by the grey stone when the thrush knocks, and the last light of Durin’s day will shine upon the keyhole.
And then the sun sets behind a mountain, and they still haven’t found the keyhole. So Thorin throws down the key in disgust and all the dwarves start to head back down the mountain, leaving only Bilbo behind to stare at the stone wall. And so Bilbo is the only one who sees when the light of the setting moon suddenly reveals the keyhole.
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the hobbit movies are very unfaithful to the book so lol
btw
probably gonna be weird timing for reasons
so uh
That thing where movie!Thorin throws down the key in disgust and walks away?
I wouldn’t have done that.
You wouldn’t have done that.
We’d wait at least an hour in case there was some beam of sunlight about to shoot through the side of the mountain, and then we’d come back tomorrow, just in case. And if that still failed we’d try again a year later. We wouldn’t drop the key. We wouldn’t wander off the instant something went wrong.
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this makes no sense
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Useless Stuff
If you go by mainstream fiction, then ‘intelligence’ means a character who is said (not shown) to speak a dozen languages, who we are shown winning a game of chess against someone else who is told to be a grandmaster; if it’s a (bad) science-fiction book then the ‘genius’ may have invented some gadget, and may speak in technobabble. As the stereotypical template for ‘intelligence’ goes on being filled in, the ‘genius’ may also be shown to be clueless about friendships or romantic relationships. If it’s a movie or TV show, then ‘intelligent’ characters (usually villains) have British accents.
To a cognitive scientist, intelligence is a kind of cognitive work, a labor performed by brains—not necessarily human brains—the same way that a car engine outputs torque that turns wheels and drives a car forward. What is this cognitive work? We could say, “To model, predict, and manipulate reality.” Or we could say, “To output actions that steer the future into outcomes high in a preference ordering.”
Hollywood’s concept of intelligence has nothing to do with cognitive work. Instead it’s a social stereotype. It’s about what ‘intelligent characters’ wear, how they talk, how many of them it takes to change a lightbulb.
I say all this, so as to mark Hollywood’s concept of ‘intelligence’ and set it aside as a fallacy when we ask how we might have gone about writing a more intelligent Thorin.
This more intelligent Thorin has not invented an amazing new kind of shield out of super-oak.
This more intelligent Thorin is not charmingly clueless or contemptibly clueless about romance.
This more intelligent Thorin does not need to use big technical-sounding words or recite numbers with many significant digits.
This more intelligent Thorin has not secretly planned out the entire encounter to give Smaug a false sense of security. We’ll talk about how to do that kind of cleverness correctly, what you might call cunning, in the section on Level II Intelligent Characters. There is no point in trying to write Level II Intelligent Characters if you have not mastered Level I. Also Level I intelligence is more important.
More intelligent Thorin does not instantly find the keyhole by use of his incredibly keen perceptual abilities. Telling the reader that a character has sharp eyes does not put a spark of inner life and optimization into that character.
More intelligent Thorin does not even solve the riddle using clues that were clearly given in earlier chapters and that the reader could in principle have figured out on their own—though that is a character feat that exhibits real cognitive labor (also covered in Intelligence Level II).
No, step one towards a more intelligent Thorin is just to have Thorin behave like there is a person inside him figuring out the best thing to do, like you or I would in his shoes, as opposed to an H-Zombie who throws down the key in order to provide Bilbo with a Dramatic Moment.
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basically
Im in pain and ive been in pain for months
My playing time will probably vary a bit at eod
Are you alright, Atlas?
no
What happened?
pain
How?