geekosystem

I'm a serious Middle-earth apologist, but I'm not even close to being a purist. Big difference. I could list off a bunch of things that Peter Jackson's movies "get wrong" about the world and stories of J.R.R. Tolkien except that they're a movie, and the changes are deliberate. I'm generally okay with that, and I love the movies. Which is why I, too, enjoy CinemaSin's latest video, "Everything Wrong With The Hobbit An Unexpected Journey In 4 Minutes Or Less."

Films that take place in Middle-earth should always debut in December. This is a tradition. One does not simply release such a film in July (as originally intended) as idly as one might walk into Mordor. Sean Bean would have none of that. Which is probably why New Line Cinema has announced that the release date for the final film in Peter Jackson's latest (prequel) trilogy has been changed. The Hobbit: There And Back Again will now hit theaters on December 17, 2014.

We got really excited when LEGO came out with a The Hobbit Bag End set over the summer, but it was just so small! Sure it's fun to build tiny LEGO versions of things, but sometimes you just want to climb inside them and play along with your LEGO pals. To do that though, you either need a shrink ray or you need to build gigantic versions of LEGO sets. Most people don't have the resources for either option, but LEGO sure does. They just released photos of a life-size version of their Bag End set, and we really want to play in it. They probably also have a shrink ray. LEGO's pretty awesome like that.

One of the great pastimes of geekdom is adding some degree of factual feasibility to works of fantasy in all its forms. With the release of The Hobbit this Friday, audiences everywhere will be reunited with a much younger, more energetic Gollum than the one they've come to know in The Lord of the Rings trilogy. But a haunting question that fans have tried to wrap their heads around for years is how has Gollum managed to be so long lived in spite of the fact he dwelled within the perpetual darkness of the Misty Mountains, dining purely on fish. Using assumptions on Hobbit physiology and his working knowledge of Gollum's subterranean home, Rhett Allain -- an associate professor of physics at the Southeastern Louisiana University -- has crunched the numbers and deduced how many fish the little guy needs to eat to function. The number may shock you -- if you actually care about this sort of thing, of course.

There are a lot of different kinds of geeks in the world. You can be a literature geek, a video game geek, a comic book geek, or really geek out about just about anything. We won't judge you. The folks over at Movoto.com geek out about real estate, but lucky for the Internet, they also geek out about The Hobbit. They've combined their interests to create a real estate valuation and listing for Bilbo Baggins' home, Bag End. They even put it together in tasty infographic form.

Are you constantly confusing the thirteen dwarves who travel with Bilbo Baggins in The Hobbit? Have you made the embarrassing faux pas of confusing Oin with Gloin? Do you not know your Bombur from a hole in the ground? Never fear, my friend, because the fine folks at Lord of the Rings Project have got you covered with this convenient flowchart that can tell you in just a few simple questions which diminuitive, bearded adventurer you're looking at. Click through to embiggen and see the whole chart, and prepare to amaze friends and family alike with your encyclopedic knowledge of Dwarven lore. Or, you know, depress them with it. Probably that second thing.

Fans of The Lord of the Rings each have their own special way of celebrating the countdown to yet another film installment of their favorite franchise. Some opt to dress like hobbits and refuse to shave their feet until opening night, and others devote themselves to speaking nothing but Elvish for any and all social interactions. Portland's hometown hero the Unipiper, on the other hand, takes it one step further by combining his famous schtick -- playing the bagpipes whilst riding a unicycle -- with his reverence for Gandalf the Grey. What we ultimately get is too much nerdiness for one video to possibly contain!

Look, we're just as excited as the next geek blog that Peter Jackson's The Hobbit film adaptation appears to be chugging along nicely. We love Sir Ian McKellen, and it's hard to dislike Martin Freeman. That doesn't mean we're immediately going to buy anything and everything that's somehow associated with the movie. Microsoft appears to disagree. They've inked a deal with Warner Bros. that allows the technology giant to use the characters for Windows Phone 8 advertising, because everyone clearly associates The Hobbit with phones.

The Hobbit has a new trailer, so now we all have something to look at while we have conversations about how it's going to stack up against the LotR flicks, and if 48 FPS is going to make things look weird and whether we're going to see it. Spoiler Alert: We are all totally going to see it. With that in mind, let's all settle in for two fun-filled minutes of the next movie that will inevitably make a bazillion dollars because, as we've gone over, we are all going to see it, most of us on opening weekend, and most of us more than once. A few of us will even use it an excuse to hide out in a movie theater until Christmas goes away. Just accept it and move on with your life.

As everyone already knows, Peter Jackson has split up his production of The Hobbit into a trilogy, instead of just two movies like he initially planned. That's old news. Now that he's ripped that band-aid off, Jackson has released the new trajectory of the trilogy, including names for both the second and third parts of the series, and the release date for the last movie.  Not much has changed about the first two movies; both films are coming out the same day as Jackson originally planned. Not everything about the second movie is as it was, though. Now that it isn't the final movie in the series, "The Hobbit: Part Deux" has a new, Smaug-ier name.

Today, Peter Jackson announced that The Hobbit would be stretched into not just two feature-length films, but three. That's right, The Hobbit will be a trilogy. The novel that is shorter than all three volumes of the Lord of the Rings will be adapted into three films. As a fan of Tolkien's novels and histories, and as a fan of Peter Jackson's films, let me say: This is not a good idea. Find out why after the jump.

We'd heard rumors that LEGO was going to have som fun announcements at San Diego Comic-Con this year. Our expectations were happily exceeded when this handsome rendering of Bilbo's Bag End was unveiled yesterday. And yes, it comes with the dwarves.

The announcement of LEGO partnering to make Lord of the Rings themed products hasn't stopped LEGO enthusiast Blake Baer from doing up scenes from The Hobbit with interlocking bricks. Highlighting pivotal scenes from the book, Baer's models are all in the details -- a moose head on the wall, the lived-in look of Lake-town, the immensity of Smaug's hoard, and so on. While outstanding in its own right, it's a bit of a cruel reminder how much longer we'll have to wait for the movie.

So it looks like for the new Lord of the Rings movie, they're ripping off Star Wars and doing the whole prequel thing. They'll be hard pressed to make something better than The Phantom Menace though, am I right? That being said this trailer actually makes The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey look pretty good for a shameless Harry Potter clone. I might have to check it out.

The seminal fantasy story The Hobbit turns 75 this year, and Harper Collins did what most publishing companies do to celebrate anniversaries: They began work on a special edition. But in the course of researching the material, they uncovered a veritable dragon horde of never before seen sketches and paintings by author J.R.R. Tolkien. Though Tolkien's art graced the original printing of the books, and has been reused since, it turns out that he did numerous alternative versions of illustrations prior to the books publication. Many of these have simply been moldering in the Bodleian Library at Oxford since then. But now, you (yes, you!) can see them for yourself. Read on below for more images of Middle Earth, as imagined by the master himself.