I'll be the second person you know who liked the romance.
Primarily I enjoyed it on the strength of the two actors. Evangeline Lilly and Aidan Turner are both genuinely appealing and sell the scenes they're in together.
Having said that, I want to be clear: Tauriel shouldn't be in the movies at all — like so much else…

Gender-bending some of the dwarves is a really fun idea. I remember a photo series in io9 a while back showing the dwarves as women, but the notion of actually "female-izing" some of the dwarves for the films themselves never occurred to me. It'd be a radical change in the story, but would it be more radical than…

Puts me in mind of the animated "magic books" in Peter Greenaway's adaptation of Shakespeare's The Tempest, Prospero's Books. Check out this clip from the opening of the film:

Obviously it resembles the inside of Peter Jackson's head more than it does the book "The Hobbit," but plainly it's going to look great.

Absolutely astounding.

Oh, I'm no pessimist about the existence, or indeed the numerousness, of these civilizations. I'm strictly talking about the trickiness of being in sync with them.

I'd meant to bring this up in my original post but forgot, so I'm glad you did. Yeah, once you take into account the vast spaces, enormous time scales, huge difference between evolutionary and civilizational time, and speed of light limitation, the notion of any two civilizations being simultaneously visible to each…

Great analogy!

Your point about Grant going to Tennessee is just the sort of thing I was wondering about. Plainly control of the Mississippi would be decisive, so it was interesting to me that the Mississippi river region didn't seem to act as a staging ground for a Union advance until quite a bit later.

Even if many of the above limiting conditions didn't apply, the probability that other intelligent civilizations would exist at the same time as our own would be another factor. We could be in a galaxy teeming with life, even intelligent life, but the time scales are so huge that no two civilizations exist "in phase"…

Interesting how closely this matches the feeling I got from the trailers. "Looks great; is dumb."

Agreed. It's customary to come down hard on the prequels, but much of what's wrong with the prequels is already wrong with Return of the Jedi.

This needs fairly badly to be part of the soundtrack of a superhero movie.

Fascinating. I don't know the sequence of events that make up the Civil War at all well — it's a gap in my knowledge that I need to seal — so I have a uninformed beginner's question to ask. I was struck by the fact that after the land along the Mississippi has been taken by Union forces, it's a good long while…

Well of course that would be the spider world headquarters.

Pretty sure e_is_real_i_isnt was making a joke there.

I cannot fathom why they didn't also show the drop in real time. The *most* striking visual would have been the feathers falling much faster then we're accustomed to seeing them fall. Instead we see them fall in slow motion, looking *exactly* like they do when they fall through air. I honestly feel cheated.

Interesting! Good to see some not-terribly-well-known works on this list. Must look into this author/book.

Samuel R. Delany's Trouble on Triton. It tells the story of a far-future urban society (located on Triton) where sex, gender, and race are all malleable. But the viewpoint character is an immigrant from Mars, who has a lot of old-fashioned ideas about sex, gender, and race. Basically he's the Last Straight White…

Here's an article on a referendum in Switzerland for a guaranteed basic income: