I come to you from the lowest spot on earth. I mentioned that I’m on a tour of Jordan. In the last couple of days we’ve seen the northern sites of Jerash and Pella, and this evening we checked into the Marriott on the edge of the Dead Sea. Actually, the surface of the sea itself is 410 meters below sea level. My floor of the hotel is more like 385 meters down.

Even from such a remote spot, I am able to connect to the internet, so I send you all greetings and a couple of links.

Guillermo Del Toro has posted an interesting item on the message boards of TheOneRing.net, discussing how he uses 3×5 index cards in making his script adaptations. I myself have been a devoted user of 3×5 cards since my days as a graduate student back in the mid-1970s. I have many thousands of them by now, carefully filed away. When the University of Wisconsin-Madison library went over to a computer index, my husband and I salvaged some of their beautiful blond wood card-file units and still use them to store our cards. I had one drawer for each chapter of The Frodo Franchise, and I occasionally dip into them when I need facts for this blog and other purposes.

I know that many people scorn them and do all their notes in their computers. I have learned to do a lot with computers, but I still love index cards. They can never get lost if your computer crashes. You can write them out in all sorts of circumstances when using even a laptop would be difficult. Best of all, you can line them up on the floor, push them around into different patterns, and see all of them at once, no matter how many you put down at the same time.

To me, knowing that GDT is using index cards to adapt The Hobbit just gives me more confidence that all is going well.

By the way, anyone who wants to keep track of GDT’s contributions to the message boards at TORN might want to book his user-profile page. Just click on the “Show user’s posts” button to find out what he’s been talking about lately.

Moving to a very different topic, last Thursday the IFC [Independent Film Channel] Film News website posted a story by Matt Singer called “List: Fan Faction – Five Documentaries about Nerd Culture.” The occasion is the release of the film We Are Wizards, on Harry Potter fandom. The retrospective descriptions of four previous documentaries on fans deals with Trekkies (1997), KISS Loves You (2004), Cinemania (2002; not on a specific fandom but on obsessive filmgoers), and Ringers: Lord of the Fans (2005). The latter gets a mention in The Frodo Franchise, and I thoroughly enjoyed my interview with Carlene Cordova (director and co-writer) and Cliff Broadway (producer and co-writer).

Singer says “Director Carlene Cordova knows her stuff,” and he adds, “of all the fan docs, this one most feels like some kind of recruitment video.” The point being that the other films are made by outsiders looking into fandoms. Carlene herself is a long-time fan and former contributor to TheOneRing.net. Not surprisingly, Singer has a bit of fun at the expense of fans, but overall it’s a pretty good summary of the documentaries.

I’m online for another 23 hours, so if anything happens, I’ll post. Day after tomorrow we’re off to Petra, the main reason for my having taken the tour in the first place. I’ll try to get a decent photo to post!