hyperreality
(Day 11)
At the beginning of The Two Towers, there's a long swooping shot around some big impressive blue mountains. When I saw it, I was all, "Fake!" - they were just too perfect and pointy to be real. Later, watching the documentary extras, it turns out that those shots were actually real, taken with a helicopter. Alaska is like that, all the time. Layer and layer of mountains in diamond-edged fractal perfection, in every direction, high enough to dent the sky. To perfect to be real - it looks like someone dropped a computer-generated matte behind the first couple of rows of stunted trees.
I keep expecting to get out of the car sometime and stub my toe on some knee-high ice-blue jagged peak.