My Actifit Report Card: April 22 2022

Better productivity today, though still not great. I’m just kind of sluggish in part because I’ve really done something to my foot. Not sure if my little toe is broken or just really heavily battered, but it’s still bruised and a little swollen.

However, it does seem to be getting a little better, so I suspect it’s probably not broken. Either way, I’m going to be fairly gentle on it and probably tape it to its neighbor whenever I’m going to be on it for any significant activity.

Other than the foot, I’m actually feeling pretty good, though obviously limping around means that I haven’t gotten much in the way of steps.

I’ve been watching the extended editions of the Lord of the Ring movies and live-tweeting them.

It shouldn’t surprise anyone that they’re quite good, especially given their reputation (not that popularity always equates to good art, but in this case it happens to be correct), but I’m surprised by how well the CGI holds up. Even things where I know it’s CGI usually don’t stand out to me (and I have some background in the field), though there are a few things that obviously don’t work fully.

The biggest issue they have is that they don’t have great lighting support. The textures, models, and animations work pretty well, and for small or background objects they can get some pretty good stuff.

But any time the CGI takes center stage they really can run into issues. There’s one example where the camera pans around a hilltop ruin, and you can even notice the seam where they’ve inserted the CGI behind footage (to say nothing of it being the weakest scene, in Fellowship).

The problem is that between taking bathroom/food breaks, tweeting, and occasional distractions it takes me like six hours to go through each film.

However, I haven’t actually seen Fellowship or The Two Towers in several years, and as much as I may make memes about them or joke about stuff (“Aragorn? More like Ara-gone-over-the-cliff!”) there’s actually some really potent stuff in there. A lot of that is Tolkien, of course, but Jackson also made the right decisions throughout the filming process to really bring them to life.

There are also some atypical things. I think the ending to Two Towers was weak, though the Fellowship’s was stronger. When you’re watching one film a day, that’s not such a big deal, but I wouldn’t be too surprised if some people didn’t return for Return of the King.

The fonts are absolutely abysmal. It’s one thing when you’re dealing with Tolkien’s scripts (which are actually quite decent in my opinion, though I may be biased), but it’s another when dealing with the English/Roman titles that appear on screen.

I know that’s really nit-picky, but it’s offensive precisely because so much other stuff is good. I even looked it up and the fan-made recreations of the font usually drop the most offensive elements, which leads to questions about whether they were hand-lettered or who made the typeface and how they thought it was a good idea.

Bespoke typefaces for genres (even ones I like) have always been pretty darn awful, and fantasy fonts are usually the worst offenders (and have to be, because authentic blackletter or fraktura can be pretty hard for modern audiences). At least with sci-fi you usually get a mediocre serif, which at worst is a little tacky and is usually inoffensive, if uninspired.

This report was published via Actifit app (Android | iOS). Check out the original version here on actifit.io

Walking