Upgraded my Seiko 5 with a new bracelet and it’s like a whole new watch! A classic gets a modern twist. Cheers! 🥃

I've never been one to put anything but handwritten words in a journal, but recently, I started printing things and sticking 'em in there. It's always exciting to find something new that I can print for my journal. Putting sheet music in a journal never would've occured to me before, but I wish I had thought of it sooner! What little, outside-the-box things do you like putting in your journals?

My initial prompt “What are all the Nissan Altima trims?” I didn’t add the text (2024) but chat gpt pre filled it for me but still got it wrong.

Paid $20 for this in hopes I could repair it. Previous owner recapped it and looks like some of the leads are missing copper… they had a wire attached to the bubble of solder inside the circle.

Original I thought a laptop is just the same. But after using it on the couch, and then a 1.6 lb external monitor with it, I found the deck is preferable than my 3.6 lb laptop blowing hot air on my lap for long sessions. Punch 15 hours in my recent game. I am happy with the portability of the Deck. Now I am yearning some co-op play along when I visit my friends.

The plant on the right is an Ivory Coast. What’s the one on the left?

Why I don't THINK Weta Workshop Worked on Season Two

Around July 2022, Sir Richard Taylor had this to say about The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power: "Our company worked on the first series, we're very proud of the fact that we did." This use of the past tense does seem to imply working only on the first season, but its by no means a definitive reading of the interview. This was shortly BEFORE the show's move to the UK, which we know came to the Kiwi crew by complete surprise, although it remains possible that by that point the showrunners had made the decision, and told Weta that their services will not be required for season two without necessarily going into details.
Again, I want to stress that Sir Richard's choice of words by no means guarentees that Weta sat season two out. Then again, we know many of the Kiwi contractors have either stopped working for the show - costumier Kate Hawley and the music ensemble Plan 9, for instance - or radically downscaled their involvement, like caligrapher Daniel Reeve. Where crew from season one stayed on - like John Howe and dialect coach Leith McPherson - they were usually based in Europe or the UK to begin with. Its thus only reasonable to assume Weta will do the same.
Weta were good sports to share the lead-up to the Season Two teaser on their Twitter handle, but hadn't commented nor shared the teaser itself, suggesting that they were merely (and characteristically) being gracious to a project they HAD worked on previously, rather than setting-up their own involvement, as they had done in their steadfast embracing of Season One.
One of the two major departments Weta worked on for the show in Season One - that being prosthetics - had perforce been put out of their hands for Season Two, with the prosthetics supervisor Barrie Gower replacing Weta's Jamie Wilson. Its unrealistic to expect to ship prosthetics - which have a limited shelf life - from halfway around the world, and ideally you'd want the same studio to be responsible for design, fabrication and on-set application.
Although they also worked on Celebrimbor's pressure forge and some of the Numenorean and Elven symbols - including the High-Elven star, practically lifted from their version of Gil-galad's emblem for the New Line films - Weta's other main prerogative was the weapons (but NOT the armour). This included bows, quivers, arrows, shields (including straps) and some props that aren't really used as weapons like Feanor's hammer.
The High-Elven Star: essentially a homage Weta's Daniel Falconer snuck into the show
While it remains possible that they had kept that department under their belt - at least in terms of concept design rather than fabrication - I find it unlikely. Its true that Weta does provide concept art, without fabrication, for off-shore productions: see their erstwhile work for Denis Villenueve's Dune: Part One as an example.
However, the recent teaser shows High-Elven swords and bows that are a notable departure from Weta's High-Elven weapons from Season One. It, of course, remains entirely permissible that the showrunners commissioned new designs from the workshop, and in fact the new, more katana-like Elven swords are closer to Weta's previous iterations of Elven swords (cf. Hadhafang or Thranduil's twin swords) than to their High-Elven weapons for Season One, although they're admittedly not too far off Arondir's sword.
Having said that, elsewhere in the trailer we see the same Hawley costumes and armour retained, as well as the same Weta-made weapons from Season One: Arondir is still sporting his daggers, quiver and bow, Pharazon draws his gorgeous, bejewelled sword before the Eagle of Manwe, flanked by guards carrying the same ol' spears. We see Lindon guards with their Battersea-esque shields and spears, Durin III with his ax, Durin IV with his dagger, Adar with his Zweihander, and Isildur still with the confusingly-Rohan-like Numenorean cavalry sword.
The similarities would thus make it unlikely to expect for new designs - for the same culture and from the same studio - to be such an aesthetic departure from Season One, especially something as insignificant as a quiver. My educated guess - and that's all it is, a guess - is that its a local workshop emulating the Weta style of old.
This emulation can also be seen in other departments, like the new Elven shields - with the same hourglass-like shape as Weta's High-Elven shields for the New Line films, but NOT for the show - and the helmets with the more overt blade-like crests, again in the style of Weta's work for New Line rather than Hawley's more subtle nod to that style in Season One. Not to mention the seemingly greater prevalence of Elves with long manes.
Galadriel and company, and their quivers: a design unlikely to be revised from Weta's Season One design (below) unless a new, local Workshop entered the fray. The company's bows, seen elsewhere, are also different to this, more closely resembling Tauriel's bow.
https://preview.redd.it/w8da7widcg1d1.png?width=3840&format=png&auto=webp&s=ff7a19e093a8008fbae7a0977a2e52617c18bec9

The OTHER Weta

Here it is important to distinguish between Weta Workshop, and WetaFX (nee Weta Digital). Although founded by the same people - Sir Peter Jackson, Sir Richard Taylor and Jamie Selkirk - they're two separate companies: Roughly speaking, Weta Workshop does practical effects, WetaFX does digital effects. While they do some projects - notably Tolkien films - together, its by no means a condition sine qua non that the involvement of the one entails that of the other.
In the context of the Tolkien projects, Workshop mostly did weapons, armour and creatures, so not too far off of what they did in the show. Set, props and character designs usually fell to another Jackson company, Six-Foot-Seven, but even then Weta did the bigatures and shared the costume design credit with Ngilla Dickson, Bob Buck and Ann Maskrey (Hawley is credited, too, being that she was the costume designer for the aborted Del Toro Hobbit).
WetaFX are working on Season Two, in a capacity at least as big as they did in Season One, where they were the main VFX vendor alongside ILM. Moreso than the Workshop, WetaFX (being one the leading VFX houses in the world), provides services for films and shows all over the world, and frankly a show with the VFX requirements of The Rings of Power couldn't avoid WetaFX if they tried, although "giving them point" so to speak is definitely a meaningful gesture.
Strictly speaking, WetaFX is not a design studio: previously in Tolkien pictures, creature design tended to be provided by Weta Workshop, and then rendered by WetaFx. However, sometime before The Rings of Power went into production, one of the Workshop's designers, Nick Keller, became WetaFX' in-house designer, and for Season One had worked on (among other things) Durin's Bane, and so WetaFX' continued involvement in Season Two is meaningful to the look of the show.
An (unused) Nick Keller-Weta FX design for Season One: all that remains of it in the show are the spear and the Fell Beast
The showrunners entrusted to WetaFX in Season One mostly with places and creatures that had been depicted in the live-action films: Khazad dum as Moria, the view of the Southlands from Ostirith as Mordor, as well as Durin's Bane and the Fell Beasts: its therefore reasonable to assume that the design of Shelob will again be entrusted to WetaFX, although since New Line became stricter with their copyright she's unlikely to resemble the previous depiction of Shelob, no doubt to be excused away by the fact that she's younger.

My thought

So, where does this leave us? I've long written about the show's audiovisual identity crisis: it would be wrong to assume that, going to New Zealand, the showrunners were compelled to hire Weta and thus fell headlong into a similar aesthetic: rather, there was a concerted effort - the filming in New Zealand and the hiring of Weta being two of its symptoms rather than its causes - to model the show on the live-action films. Nevertheless, dispensing with Weta for Season Two COULD keep this issue at bay.
All the same, its clear that if Weta was indeed substituted by another studio, as is likely the case, that studio did their darndest to emulate Weta's style, and in some respects harkened even more heavy-handedly to the style of the New Line films. Perhaps it is a case of, having moved out of New Zealand, wanting to still show they "got it" and overdoing it? The same trend is evident in the digital splicing of Kiwi landscapes into the British countryside, and in the trailer's shameless appropriation of beats (but not lines, presumably with New Line cracking the whip on that end) from the live-action films.
All the same, Season Two and on could have been another noteworthy "notch" in Weta's enviable Tolkien belt, which only in this year also entails Tales of the Shire and The War of the Rohirrim. It would have been a good preparation for their forthcoming involvement in The Lord of the Rings: The Hunt for Gollum. I do regret, specifically, that they probably didn't get a crack at the weapons of the Eregion Elves: a new Elven culture they had not touched before, unless some of the designs we see were made for Season One and not shown therein.
Beyond that, its useful to keep the same team in place in the interest of season-to-season continuity. Nevertheless, the teaser shows a greater emphasis on such continuity that I had previously believed they would go for. Some early scenes seem to be picking up immediately from the end of Season One, with Galadriel and Elrond - still in the same costumes - catch up to Gil-galad's convoy back on the same Lindon set. Even in other scenes, many of the Numenorean extras seem to be in the same clothes, and while the green Eregion guards got a lot of attention in the teaser, they actually already appeared in season one.
A tale of two Narsils, both by Weta but for different companies.
As a side-note, it may well be that the Weta designers felt limited by the lega situation surrounding Season One, which required them to recreate different versions of some of their most celebrated props, namely a new, subtly redesigned Narsil. Sir Richard Taylor, in the above interview, said he didn't work on the series because he "didn't feel I had anything new to contribute to the television series." This is curious since he had by then already jumped onboard The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim, and in an appearance only shortly thereafter, said of the project that "there's so much that's fresh and exciting." This in spite of the fact that, at first blush, Rohirrim would seem to offer far less by way of new design opportunities than did Rings of Power.
In truth, not all of Weta's work on Season One was up to their otherwise-inimitable standards: I'm reminded of a making-of featurette about the making of Orcrist, which required a lot of back and forth between the Weta designers and Sir Peter Jackson. Says designer Paul Tobin: "A lot of our designs were falling into 'I've seen it with Glamdring, I've seen it with Sting." An even more egregious example is for Shadow of Mordor, where a design of an armoured Celebrimbor is almost one-for-one of a design for an armoured Thranduil, a year or two prior by the same artist, although in fairness both designs went unused.
I don't want to imply that the showrunners weren't equally forthright in their design process: from listening to John Howe, there was certainly a lot of back-and-forth with his concept art. Even in examing Weta's work its clear that in the case of some of the designs - namely, the Elven Zweihanders, which previously appeared in some Howe concept art - the showrunners came to Weta with their own ideas, rather than just giving them free reign.
Nevertheless, it does seem that in a couple of instances, Weta were allowed (perhaps on purpose?) to essentially recycle some old designs: almost all the Dwarven and many of the Silvan and Orc designs are like this. Its cool that Weta got to imagine what Durin's legendary Ax looked like, but they basically took a design for an ax that Dwalin finds in the Erebor armoury and made a subtle variation on it. The Mystics' weapons also betray a similarity, but rather to Weta's work on James Cameron's Avatar!
Even less appropriately, a spear designed for the Lindon Elves but not seen in Season One, seems derivative not of previous High-Elven designs, but off of the designs for the Woodland Realm, which would have been the freshest in the memory of the Weta designers. The main difference is the Woodland design abstracts the tree-branch shapes to avoid them seeming, to quote Keller, "too fairytale." Worst still, the Numenorean cutlasses (seen briefly at Elendil's side prior to his promotion) are inappropriately akin to the Laketown swords (again, a design surely fresh on the designers' minds) of all things!
Corporate needs you to find the differences between this picture, and this picture...[aside]: They're the same picture.
In other cases, the similarities are more abstract and work quite well: both Aranruth and the Elven broadswords - wielded by Galadriel to the Battle of the Southlands and carried by Theo into Season Two but also also brandished by the prologue Elves - feature a similar leaf-like profile to the blade: they would be more-or-less contemporaries of Glamdring, which has a similar shape. Medhor carries (but sadly doesn't get to use) a Silvan version of the Elven Great-sword from the Fellowship prologue.
Elsewhere in the film industry, of course, companies like Lucasfilm had turned this kind "reuse, reduce, recycle" mentality into a usual practice, although usually with unused designs, a-la the Shadow of Mordor example: discarded McQuarrie and Cantwell artwork from the 1975 thus ended-up in Star Was projects all the way between 1978 and 2023, where it started feeling increasingly like someone picking through the carcass of a dead movie.
In a limited extent, however, it is a useful device in terms of "tapping" into the same, initial sensibility, and as such its been used in Tolkien projects before: The White Council chamber was part of some early Rivendell designs, and similar practices are deployed in Rohirrim and are sure to be used in The Hunt for Gollum. In all these examples, however, it didn't normally involve jumping through the legal hoops that The Rings of Power had to leap through.
Neverthelss, there are a great many illustrious designs - from Elendil's Captain sword and Finrod's Dagger, through Feanor's Hammer and Dramborleg (the first Elven hammer and axe in Weta's output) to Aranruth and Medhor's Silvan Great-Sword - all represent wortwhile entries in Weta's oeuvre, and some of the best designs in the whole of the show thus far. Still, it wasn't in vain, being that several such key props are going to stay the distance in the show.