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Prof. Tarma Amelia Black

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Everything posted by Prof. Tarma Amelia Black

  1. A fish flops down upon the deck bounced there from a sailor's neck
  2. The waves go up, the waves go down, The boat goes up and down in them. My stomach goes up, my stomach goes down, I make my way to the left. No, that's PORT says my head as my stomach rebels The movement of the waves. Alas. I feed the fish.
  3. Their boots are leather and knee-high With heels of less than an inch
  4. Who hasn't heard of the Kraken? Ship swallower, monster of the deep, terror of the seas. The kraken derives its name from the Scandinavian Kraki, but the tales of it are shared throughout the world. Different sources have different information about this beast -- they all say it is large, but some legends say the Kraken is 30-50 feet in length, where others say that the older monsters are as much as a league or more in size. (1 league = 3.45234 miles). Coming up from the depths, when it is alerted to the possibility of prey, it surfaces and wraps its long tentacles around any ship, dragging it underwater and all perish. Several stories have been written by various authors, and they introduce the kraken into their tale. Tamora Pierce wrote of a Kraken in her Immortal series. A google search for "Tamora Pierce + Kraken" gets this information: "The Kraken is a powerful immortal resembling an octopus, only with many more tentacles, each of which is a mile long, and a body that is a mile and a half across. It is unclear if there is a kraken species, or only a single kraken. The only known kraken in the mortal realms, living in the depths of the Emerald Ocean and preying on ships. He was passed over by the mages who imprisoned the immortals in the Divine Realms at the beginning of the Human Era." Good Omens, by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett, mentions the Kraken. The Good Omens Lexicon relates a lot of information, including that Aziraphale is aware of the creature. "“Kraken,” he says on the night of the Antichrist‘s birth. “Great big [...] […] sleepeth beneath the thunders of the upper deep. Under loads of huge and unnumbered polypol — polipo — [ ] great seaweeds, you know. Supposed to rise right at the end, when the sea boils” . His description runs as a close (albeit intoxicated) approximation of Tennyson’s poem, which proclaims of the terrible beast, “The Kraken sleepeth […] Until the latter fire shall heat the deep; / Then once by man and angels to be seen, / In roaring he shall rise and on the surface die.”
  5. Me, too! I'll fish twice. *splash* *splash*
  6. With pink their black tricorns were ringed Flying this way, hey ho!
  7. Up on the crow's nest, weaving in the wind, I spy a ship, is it foe or friend?
  8. Thank you, Sky, Lorainia and Iverian (Dead Mousie) for giving us this great fun time! The magic of movies is, indeed, incredible. (Oddly enough, at this moment I am reading Moving Pictures by Terry Pratchett...) ps: I was very impressed by the assortment of Counterfeit Tickets that everyone came up with! :D
  9. I'd posted about DH7 and want to post about DH6 in here. When I'd read that book 6 was going to be split into 2 movies, I immediately wondered 'why'. There was a lot of speculation about having 2 films for reasons of more income - ie money. After all, if book 4, with so much information in it, so much going on, didn't have 2 movies, why would book 6 have 2? Well, after having watched both of them (no, not recently, this is from my memory of the movies), I think that the making of the book into 2 movies is valid. There was a lot going on in the movie, but I think that a lot of screen footage was needed to show that time when Harry and Ron and Hermione were away from everyone else. This was a time of great introspection, for Harry Potter and he changed. He became less 'The Chosen One' (which is really a difficult place to be stuck into) and changed to someone who knows that something has to be done in order to correct what has happened. I wonder if he would have been so able to 'walk calmly into Death's welcoming arms' without this time with Ron and Hermione, and then, later, just with Hermione. **** I wrote about DH6 part 1, to meet the criteria in the first post, but want to mention Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them. It's wonderful! I've watched the movie and read the screenplay oh maybe a couple or few times. What a delight it is. The casting is incredibly good. (I'd only have changed maybe a couple of people when I first watched it, and then, after seeing FBAWTFT 2, realized that the casting worked great.) I particularly love his suitcase! :D
  10. It's sort of funny in that my favorite books are 1 (Philosopher's Stone) and 6 (Deathly Hallows) and my favorite movies are 1 and 7 (DH part 2). What I particularly remember and enjoy from the movie are Neville Longbottom (during his encounter with Lord Voldemort and also the cutting off of Nagini's head) and Molly Weasley (Not my daughter, you ...). I loved that the quotes in the book are there in the movie. Yes! Cheering heard throughout the theatre! There were other instances which followed the book which are not favorites of mine, but they were not favorites when I read it in the book too. :( But yes, the movie was faithful to the book in many cases, and that is appreciated. I like movies which follow the stories in the books from which they are allegedly made. Of the changes made from book to movie, this is what first comes to mind -- Harry Potter did not break the Elder Wand. But overall, DH 7 was a good ending to the saga.
  11. I really enjoyed what they had created for the Maze and the graveyard scene in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. There was a feeling of danger, in the maze itself and then when Harry and Cedric got to the graveyard, that was as good as I had imagined it, and more. Ralph Fiennes portrayed an incredibly sinister, if not evil, Tom Riddle. This rendition of Voldemort felt malevolent, compared to previous viewing of him in other movies. The lighting, the music, the acting, it was all great. He's such a great actor; I think maybe that the others upped their game, being around him. "Kill the spare."
  12. Tarma pauses, looks at Iverian and Maxim, and then back to the others. She decides, in case they end up following, that it might be good for them to know where to go, so she flicks her wand towards the ones at the entrance, and glittery silver flows out, like a thin fog a couple of feet above the ground, extending towards them, and also to the staircase that Iverian indicated. Then she turns and continues on to where Maxim and Iverian are heading. "I'm sort of thinking that the person with the map should be in the lead" she said to them when she'd caught up. "What if the map changes, when it hits a certain location, and the person in the lead isn't holding the map and so might end up going where he or she shouldn't be going or it indicates a danger? Like if you were to reach those staircases to the left, and the map says 'BEWARE OF THE RABBIT' but Maxim is already there and a rabbit attacks and he doesn't know about it because he's not holding the map?"
  13. Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix is one of the few Harry Potter books I haven't read multiple times. Why? I didn't like Dolores Jane Umbridge. I didn't like reading about her and what she was doing. Bleh. While I can recognize that introducing villains is a part of good story telling, reading about her was like being coated with a toxic film of miasmic effluvium. So, watching the movie, I was strangely delighted to find that the person portraying her was basically perfect. Eeeuuuu. One thing about the movie that I didn't like is that Umbridge and her sycophants were able to gain entrance into the Chamber of Secrets. No. Just no. I saw it in silence, though. By that time, there were so many disparities between the book and the movie that I was just sort of waiting for the movie to be over. (There's another movie, about which I've not written yet, which provoked a large 'that isn't right!' when first seeing it. Ooops. Too bad I was in a movie theatre? :D )
  14. Shrek "You have the manners of a goat. And you smell like a dung-heap!"
  15. Tarma hears and sees what Iverian says and does and starts to laugh -- but throttles it and only wheezes softly. "But who is to say when that map was created? It might be really really old, before dragon and before even the royal family resided here. But yeah, good idea that Maxim goes first, while you are deciding what to do." She decides, though, to be prepared if a trap is sprung, just in case of in case.
  16. Tarma paused starting up the stairs. She looks at at Aurelia, Emily and Astor, then at Maxim who is following Iverian. She starts up the stairway, flexing her left hand, the hand which had held the rolled up parchment. She was close enough to hear Maxim's question and replied with "Like missing steps or moving stairways? Or do you mean something more dire, like cursed doorknobs and mirrors which, if you look in them, you're stuck forever ... well, until someone else breaks the curse."
  17. How to Train Your Dragon "You know, in another life, you'd have made an excellent criminal."
  18. "How many floors up is that?" Tarma asks, approaching the map with some trepidity. "Can you tell? And ... I missed out on it. Why is a dragon here? How did it get trapped in here? If it's to be 'tamed', especially, how did a wild one get caught?" She pauses a moment, then continues "Or did the dragon sneak in through some kind of open archway or portico?"
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