Apostrophe S

It has come to my attention (actually, I knew it already, but it has now been pounded into my face, thanks to a colorful graphic on my new MeasureMap alpha account) that 3 out of 4 people who visit my site are using the browser Internet Explorer. Now, I know this site looks a little screwy in IE, and I’m going to work on that eventually. I’m not going to do the paternal thing and punish IE users. That’s stupid. I’m not going to make a lot of special accomodations for IErs, but I’m not going to shake a finger at you either. What I am going to do, however, is encourage you to just drop by the Firefox website and download the latest version. Check it out. Try it on. It’s not going to hurt your computer, it’s not going to ask to overwright any files and it’s not going to sleep with your girlfriend. To put it short and simple, Firefox is just better than IE in every way. It’s more secure, it’s faster and it adheres to web standards so the pages you visit look more like what the author wanted them to look like.

It’s not hard to learn. It will even import a lot of your IE settings, and it has things IE doesn’t (such as RSS support). I’m not proselytizing here, because I’m admittedly a Safari user for the most part. All I’m saying is give it a shot. I think you’ll like it.

I stumbled across an excellent scalable vector-drawn map of Middle-Earth, of which the above image is a tight crop of, courtesy of Lords of Blah. (Although their Website seems to be flooded. And by that I don’t mean overcome with hits, I mean completely covered in water. Anyway…)

Reading “The Silmarillion” has greatly added to my understanding of Tolkien’s work and intentions with the LOTR trilogy. If the works of Tolkien have one thing, it is a commanding sense of space. Very few created worlds have the depth of detail and history that Tolkien’s Arda (his name for the world) has. Even the universe of Dune, which I would nominate as another enormously detailed fantastic world, doesn’t have that “these places once existed” feel to it that Middle-Earth has.

Anyway, I love this scalable map, because if I ever wanted to make a wall mural of Tolkien’s Middle-Earth, I wouldn’t have to draw it by hand. That said, I think the vector graphics take away much if not all of the hand-drawn quality found in maps included in Tolkien’s works. I may have to take this map and add some color, perhaps mess with some background colors.

Also, the whole reason I sought out Middle-Earth maps was to figure out why the map in the back of “The Silmarillion” seemed to have no relation to the map in the trilogy. Turns out parts of Middle-Earth were torn asunder in a great war written about in a chapter I’ve yet to get to. The map of Beleriand deserves a vector treatment as well. Maybe I’ll make that a project…