The Null Device

What would Lord of the Rings have been like, had it been written by Irvine Welsh? Probably something like this:

"Aragorn!" Gimil calls tae ays. "Ye're late again!"
"Aye," ay smiles back. "Ah ran intae some Orc cunts and they started gittin wide wi us, likesay."
Gimli looks at ays but says nowt. Ah like Gimli, eh's awright. Tidy little cunt in a fight, like ays. Nae like that homo elf who'd rather keep ehs distance and shoot some fuckin arrows from afar.
Ah sits doon and gets oot ma oan grub. Ah starts thinkin ay Arwen, and our last night togethir, when ah shagged er proper and she squealed like a wee piggie. Fit little lassie that, with the extra ay bein an elf, likes, immortal an' aw that. Those tits an' erse'll never sag!

(via Graham)

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For the past few weeks, Warren Ellis' blog has been running predictions for 2004 from the various gonzo futurists, scifi writers, early adopters and scary goth camgirls he knows; Matt Jones' predictions are probably the most interesting of the series:

BrIC: 2004 is the year where the cultural and economic dominance by BrIC [Brazil, India, China] starts to emerge. More movies of the calibre of 'City of God' dominate the movie and soundtrack charts. Brazil's equivalent of the Neptunes dominate the global ringtone charts. Kids on the 8mile practice not rap, but capoeira battles.

CORMANRINGS: In 1977, Lucas unleashed Star Wars. There were a gazillion cheapo ripoffs on tv and screen including Roger Corman's awesomely bad-but-I-love-it "Battle beyond the stars": y'know the one with John-Boy Walton as the hero... The oscar-winning success of Peter Jackson's Tolkien trilogy coincides with the low-low price of pro-am digital video and film production to produce a bumper crop of copyright-skirting elvish nonsense of a similarly amusing/appalling ilk.

(Machinima meets Dungeons & Dragons, anyone?)

Update: There's more on BrIC in the news: a piece on the Brasilia Consensus replacing the Washington Consensus, and a piece on the G20 (which includes BrIC) and EU issuing a joint communique on global trade talks. (Though isn't the EU, economically speaking, an inherently neo-liberal construct?)

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Mental health groups protest Gollum, who, they say, perpetuates negative stereotypes of people suffering from schizophrenia. Umm, yeah.

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An interesting piece from a materials journal about the weapons and armour in the Lord of the Rings film, and how they were made. The attention to detail sounds nothing short of stupendous. (via bOING bOING)

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A Guardian piece denouncing the Lord of the Rings as racist; in particular, taking issue with the way that the entire orc race is condemned, and the problematic characterisation of good and evil ethnicities and races:

To cap it all, the races that Tolkien has put on the side of evil are then given a rag-bag of non-white characteristics that could have been copied straight from a BNP leaflet. Dark, slant-eyed, swarthy, broad-faced - it's amazing he doesn't go the whole hog and give them a natural sense of rhythm.

Over-the-top political correctness, or does he have a point? Is LotR any more "racist" than mainstream consensus was 50 years ago? If not, should old literature be sanitised or censored to kill the poisonous ideas lurking within it? (Perhaps it should be treated like Mein Kampf, and released only with scholarly annotations deconstructing it?) Discuss.

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