Blog Challenge 2011: Turn It Up To '11!

Heeeello, everybody! It's a new year, and with a new year comes new posts. This year, I'm participating in the Post A Week Blog Challenge on Wordpress, which means two things. 1) More regular updates here, at least once per week. And 2) I now have a 'mirror site' of sorts, meaning all my posts from here on out will appear on Wordpress as well. You can find my Wordpress mirror at (http://shadowsofvalhalla.wordpress.com/), and I encourage you to follow me there, though everything I post there and more will still be posted here.

Note: The following contains information about a TV series and a movie. Though I will do my best to avoid spoilers, I recommend treading lightly if you haven't seen Watership Down or Voyage of the Dawn Treader.

Now that that's out of the way, I've been watching the Watership Down TV series lately. Most people stumble across it and watch it because they were a fan of the original movie and book, and a number of them are rightfully miffed. They turned Blackberry into a doe, and they changed and reordered a lot of the events, completely cutting out the events at Sandleford Warren altogether. On the other hand, the TV series as a whole is actually pretty good. If you don't go into it with any expectations, the characters are relatively well done and can really draw you in. There is one particular episode where the gull, Keehar, brings news back to Watership Down that Hazel and his raiding party are gone, and not coming back. (He thinks that a fox ate them.) And Pipkin's reaction is enough to bring tears to one's eyes. (Though the effect is somewhat less, considering that we already know they're still alive.)

In more theatrical news, I saw the new Narnia movie today, Voyage of the Dawn Treader. It's a good movie, even with the heavy religious undertones (overtones?) at the end. My favorite character, I think, is Reepicheep, the chief mouse (and a noble one to boot), though Eustace was also pretty good after his little debacle as a dragon. (On a side note, said debacle got me considering that it might be nice to spend a day or two as a dragon, so long as I don't get shot.)