Well, here we have another personal
dedication page to James Cameron's
most recent film known as AVATAR.
Is there a difference to other pages of
this sort? Probably not. However, it is my
personal invitation and gateway to joining
a world-wide fan-base known as Avatar-Forums.com
Recently, when Avatar-Forums.com went down for a
little while (due to an unannounced change of
servers for space & bandwidth reasons),
I also joined one of its partner forums known as
Tree of Souls.
You can meet me in both virtual places - just watch out for the
name Txim_Asawl (that being Na'vi for "big butt").
You can guess, that I picked the name for humourous
reasons.
~*Txim Asawl*~'s Avatar on Avatar-Forums and Tree of Souls
Some (more or less) Avatar-themed music videos:
A psytrance track called Seeds by Ekoplex
Track 4 on his album Creatures of the Forest
featuring a certain Na'vi female, telling us, which seeds
the track is about: "Seeds of the Sacred Tree... very pure spirits!"
Two quite different takes at classic Christmas songs:
A message of importance:
While, as we all know, Avatar and Pandora are fiction,
there is a lot of places and people facing the same
problems and enemies tha Na'vi do...
Pandora exists on Earth, too.
Therefore, here is a link to a starting point to get active in
protecting natural resources and the rights of indigenous people:
To get back to the topic of humour, as mentioned above
about the basis of my Na'vi forum user name,
that humour is also the common element of the
download links below... the other two are resources
you might find useful:
The Screenplay (2007 version) - SPOILER ALERT (430 KB)
A list of scenes missing from the film - SPOILER ALERT (381 KB)
"The Pandora Rules" - a list of humourous rules, made by
creative members of naviblue.com (146 KB)
A blog made by an artist from the US East Coast, with some information
as read in the Activist Survival Guide and nice pictures, too, plus a report how
Avatar has influenced the world of fashion at the
Australian Fashion Week in May 2010 (link leading to a press report by The Australian).
One of the two models featured in Na'vi bodypaint was the aboriginal model
Samantha Harris.
She would have made a gorgeous Na'vi, indeed.
Non-fictional reading recommendations for Avatards:
Original Wisdom, written by Robert Wolff, is a compilation of his own
experience as a psychologist and self-studied anthropologist in the early 1960s, when
living in Malaysia and doing research on the natives there. Most noteably,
the Sng'oi (the name means "people" - sounds familiar, doesn't it?) are
the closest to real-existing Na'vi on Earth as you can get... by now,
sadly, this very tribe has become extinct, or rather absorbed and assimilated
by the Malaysian culture, no longer living the way it has been described in
Wolff's writings.
This book is certainly a good read, not only for Avatards. Other writings
of his are mainly criticisms of "civilized" society as it is. His essays
can be read on wildwolff.com, his
very own web site.
The Legacy of Luna is the auto-biographical story of Julia Butterfly Hill
and her two-year squat in a large redwood tree in northern California in the late
1990s, protesting against clear-cutting by Pacific Lumber, which had then become
a part of the Texan-owned Maxxam corporation, turning former family-owned
companies into cash cows to milk, not regarding any ill effect to employees or
the environment.
By living in this tree, named "Luna" by activists (since they built the platform
she later lived on in a full moon night), Julia has created a "hometree" of her own,
quite some time before James Cameron presented the Omaticaya home to us. And it
also is a strong message, that indeed one person can make a change by ways of
love and commitment. Therefore, the "Yes, we can!" message should not be attributed
to Mr. Obama, but to her, really.
Jungle Child is yet another auto-biography, this time by Sabine Kuegler who
grew up among the Fayu, an indigenous tribe in West-Papua, studied by her parents.
Her life among the Fayu was also made into a film based on this book, focussing on
her childhood and youth. Sabine Kuegler's two other books following The Jungle
Child dealt with her life after leaving the jungle at age 17.
Ruf des Dschungels ("Call of the Jungle") is the story of her return to
West-Papua in 2005 and of revisiting her childhood friends. In addition to that visit, she
also became aware of atrocities and human rights violations committed against the
Papuans by the Indonesian
government after occupying West-Papua. She then helped in making the case of the
indigenous people of Papua public, who are facing death for their independence protest
and endangerment by clearing of the jungle for industrial projects.
Her third book, entitled
Jägerin und Gejagte ("Huntress and Hunted"), is the sometimes
heart-rending description of her trying to deal with Western society after
living in a world which has not prepared her to survive in an environment based
on emotional hardness, competition and functioning instead of living. Lapsing
into depression, she was short of committing suicide, but learned - sometimes
the hard way - to adapt and get by.
A few glimpses at my personal Avatar collection (which has grown a little):
An advertizing stand I was fortunate to get
for free from a tech store, since they did not
need it anymore... And better for me to have it
than to see it in the trash bin
Close-up view of the Avatar basics, so to speak:
Artbook, DVD, Original score CD, Activist Survival Guide
A new addition: my new favourite coffee mug
Jake would say to this: "My cup is empty... trust me."
Well, this mug is empty, but only until I fill it up with my usual
morning coffee.
A nice poster depicting our favourite cute blue couple
(60 x 90 cm) to hang above my bed and to dream of Pandora...
The 2011 Avatar postcard calendar (can be hung up on the wall or used as
a deskstop calendar)
Wednesday, Nov. 17, 2010: Arrival of an unremarkable recycled cardboard
envelope at the office...
...which contained something remarkable, though:
Yes, the Extended Collector's Edition DVD has finally arrived... and has been watched already, too.
Funnies ahead!!
Two little pictures of my own making:
A classic GIF - how did Neytiri get the idea for that face?:
Some parody videos from YouTube (saving you the time to search):
The famous sex scene revealed (before the original special edition came out):
Live Avatar Role-Playing (courtesy of Hometree Wisconsin):
Live Avatar Chat Roulette (Hometree Wisconsin members online):
How Avatar should have ended:
Yeah, right, the Ride of the Valkyries certainly was missing, there, Jim!
A nice reference to tsaheylu from the award-winning nerd comedy show The Big Bang Theory:
