This whole convo is reminding me that I gotta rewatch Deadwood now

sufficiently advanced postmodernism is indistinguishable from the effects of getting kicked in the head by a horse

Anyway, if you do the extended editions for your New Year’s binge then more power to you. I hope you have fun. There’s certainly nothing wrong with doing it however you want!

But I do think you’re watching inferior films, even if it has more story to offer

Another far less praised example of this is the Star Wars special editions, where every noticeable scene addition or change is bad. It’s almost impressive, honestly. (None of the LotR scenes are as bad as Ep 4 Jabba.) Maybe harder to study and compare since the originals are hard to come by anymore

Of course you will have things in your writing that *do* need more depth or elaboration. But also it’s possible to give “too much” and then other aspects of the story suffers. Even if the “too much” stuff, in isolation, is good. It might be good but not right for that story, or not done in that way

These are long movies based on a longer book, and therefore always an instinct to add just a little more to help round out a scene, a character, a bit of world-building. But that’s a trap! Comparing the two versions is not a bad writing exercise, actually, for anyone working on plot/pacing issues

There are individual scenes and moments that are pretty good. The Faramir flashback explains a lot! You get closure on Saruman/Wormtongue (though I don’t love that scene for pedantic book-reader reasons). But overall the pace is slower, and by the time you get to RotK the flow is essentially ruined

The theatrical film versions are superior to the extended, and I think it’s bad that the extendeds are now the default versions most people watch. It’s a prime example of how “more story” is not usually “better story” and I think you see similar problems across a lot of multi-part stories today

I forget who but someone here on BlueSky noted that ChatGPT is like a manifestation of the One Ring. It was created by evil in order to serve evil. You may think it won’t destroy you because you are good and will only use it a little, or only for good things. You are wrong. You can’t. Nobody can.

If that means I suffer in some hypothetical future scenario where owning a gun/using AI might have somehow saved my life, well…I guess I’m dead. There is actually a moral calculus that you should think through here and some things aren’t worth it.

“It’s important to know how to use this tool.” No it’s not. Some tools are bad. You don’t need to learn them.

I don’t know how to fire a gun and it is not a skill I will ever possess because I think they are immoral and the same goes for ChatGPT.