Quark Blast's page

Wheel of Time S3 trailer out now.

Looks.... still a bit of a mess.

Watched with my cousin and family. Shockingly good. Aimed at 12-year-olds +- 4 years but still quite good. Truly a Star Wars story.
Thank the Force!

Movie is coming up here soon (December 13th, 2024) and the early reviews are rather a mixed bag, sadly.... though unsurprisingly.

Animated is not my favorite and it seems in the marketing they knew this - see here for the original trailer leading and inter-cut with 50%+ live action shots from Jackson's 25-year-old LotR movie trilogy. And they also early released an 8-minute segment from the movie.

I may go see it on the big screen but only if many favorable reviews come out from people I trust. It just doesn't look that good.

I may watch.

If they rework it in the manner of Snow White I'll give it a hard pass.

Honestly, I think at this point they should just have made a Falcon and the Winter Soldier movie. No need to "update" the characters or presentation - just give us Bucky and Sam and I'm all in! Oh please! Oh please!

I finally got around to watching it. It was entertaining, but as much as I was impressed with how the first part followed the book as best it could, I was disappointed with part two. I especially disliked the way they portrayed Chani and Stilgar. In fact, I thought much of the Fremen culture was handled poorly.

Could you be more specific?

I guess I'm not that worried because the dude is 78 and eats at McDonald's.

Yeah, well, the Wizard of Omaha is 94 and eats peanut brittle by the fistful and washes it down with Coke®.

Powder is considerably less sympathetic. And this season has a more martial feel to it, making things more girl-boss than last season (didn't think that was possible). Still the best new animation out there.

Quark Blast wrote:

Villaneuve's strength in adapting Dune is the same Peter Jackson had with the LotR trilogy. Namely, in each case the director stayed true to the author's vision as laid out in the books.

I will always resent Peter Jackson for what he did to the LotR trilogy. I idolized Aragorn in the books. Turning him into a whiny, emo, "But I don't want to be king," was his greatest failing, but so many unnecessary rewrites of fundamental character traits like that.

And yet he did such a d**ned good job otherwise that it's unlikely anyone will try again for at least another 20 years, and they'll try to emulate Jackson's vision rather than Tolkein's.

Must be a generational thing. I recall Aragorn being a little emotionally distraught what with all the tragic death in his family. In the movie Boromir certainly sells Aragorn as a true captain of men with his dying words.

I thought Éowyn was miscast - a fine actress but not very good impression of 19yo puppy-love when coming from a woman in her 30's.

Faramir was the one who's character was uselessly changed. I get that the One Ring needed to be shown as powerfully tempting to keep up the film-narrative but, really, not everyone is tempted by power and Faramir certainly wasn't in the books.

Makes the Top 5 as a TV series from this year for sure. And I agree, we needed to see more Robert Pattinson.

Unpopular opinion time:

We finally watched Villaneuve's Dune Part 2 last night.

While I love the design of the ornithopters and the cinematography, honestly, it left me just as cold as the Syfy Dune/Children of Dune left me. And that was at least more faithful to the book. Villaneuve started out with the book, and then got bored and decided to remake Lawrence of Arabia instead. I got very tired of shouting "THAT'S NOT THE WAY IT HAPPENED!"

But it was pretty....

SyFy Dune was not so great. Say, "C+" TV fair, tops.

SyFy Children of Dune cast 24yo James McAvoy and 22yo Jessica Brooks as the titular 10yo twins but was a better effort. Say, "B+" TV fair.

Villaneuve's strength in adapting Dune is the same Peter Jackson had with the LotR trilogy. Namely, in each case the director stayed true to the author's vision as laid out in the books.

Furthermore, the music is nothing like David Lean's Lawrence of Arabia. Though worthy of the Oscars it won, Lean's movie is scarcely comparable to Villaneuve's, except incidentally in the desert setting.

The transformation of Paul from princeling to prophet was handled exceptionally well. Chani's roll in the story, while a little different than the book, is a reasonable modification. His handling of the Bene Gesserit, and spice prescience, is brilliant.

Everything that's wrong with AI and automated systems in a brief, hilarious nutshell:

(1) My original manager (OM) resigned in March of 2022.
(2) My new manager (NM), director (D), and vice president (VP) were all laid off in August of 2022.
(3) Within a year, D managed to find a new position at Global Megacorporation.

So, we're moving to a new file management system. I had to put in a request for ownership of all of OM and NM's stuff so I could continue to maintain the archives. Since OM had resigned, the transfer went through with no issues. Since NM had been laid off, an automatic approval was triggered to NM's manager. The system checked, "Who was his manager?", found D, and assigned her the approval.

She's in a completely different division now, but system wouldn't proceed without her approval. Fortunately, she's good people and bemusedly approved the request. But neither automated systems nor AI handle, "This person was with the company, then wasn't, but now is again," well.

"Automated systems" sounds like Workday - the bane of everyone everywhere if they work at a large corporation or government enterprise.

This series is to Batman as Andor is to Star Wars - excellent in its own right but also fits nicely in the previous legendarium.

I slogged through Gotham but this show is so much better it makes me regret all over again all the hours I wasted watching Gotham.

Maybe they wanted to see how well it caught on before tying the Batman into it directly. One can only hope!

Quark Blast wrote:

DM_aka_Dudemeister wrote:

I don't even know how to respond to the idea of taking second-hand information as gospel, especially in an environment where outrage and clickbait generates engagement thanks to the nightmare of modern algorithms.

Freehold DM wrote:

Seriously?

You let them do your thinking for you?

Ah, the rejoinder of people who haven't looked at the evidence presented* but prefer to slam my sources in gleeful self-righteous ignorance. That and the bold assumption that I can't outsmart the YouTube algorithm to find quality content. People are so funny.

* Dan and Grace are about as open-minded and fair in the art of film criticism as one is ever likely to discover. Are there better sources out there? Maybe but I have a life to live and I know what walks and what merely talks when I see it. Go ahead, watch a post or three from each of them and tell me they're not worth listening to.

That's a lot of words to use to say "yes"....

That's a unique and free-wheeling interpretation of my "lot of words".

You also make it abundantly clear you'll never so much as take a listen to see if Dan and Grace are any good at their jobs but simply continue to sit back and lob stones.

For those with an open mind:
Watching good content is a favorite pastime. I cannot possibly watch/review everything film + streaming. Therefore I wisely let others, whose job it is to do just that and who show themselves to be informed and fair minded, present their data and I choose from there. I get other incidental input from various friends and/or coworkers but Grace and Dan provide well in excess of 50% of my input for decision making.

Was talking it over after watching episode 4 today and the consensus we came to is that there are Good Scenes in this but those scene are then tied together with the flimsiest of string.

They just don't seem to put a lot of effort in getting to each of the good scenes.
Overall it's ok but it should be better

For $1,000,000,000 it should be a ####### #### better!

Sadly, per your post, the effort is truly asinine. If one were to come at this knowing nothing about Tolkien's legendarium, there is this bewildering mix of fantastic fantasy world CGI and utter tripe for a story. Aside from that and the costuming (EXCEPTION! Númenóreans foremost) and the good (for a TV-show) homage to Howard Shore, the show stands as a peer to old TV shows like Hercules or similar.

Now, if one is familiar with Tolkien's writings.... Well, let's just say that, though I don't promote such channels, the haters score many valid points when discussing this show.

Can you say "ad blocker"?
:D

I don't even know how to respond to the idea of taking second-hand information as gospel, especially in an environment where outrage and clickbait generates engagement thanks to the nightmare of modern algorithms.

Seriously?

You let them do your thinking for you?

Ah, the rejoinder of people who haven't looked at the evidence presented* but prefer to slam my sources in gleeful self-righteous ignorance. That and the bold assumption that I can't outsmart the YouTube algorithm to find quality content. People are so funny.

* Dan and Grace are about as open-minded and fair in the art of film criticism as one is ever likely to discover. Are there better sources out there? Maybe but I have a life to live and I know what walks and what merely talks when I see it. Go ahead, watch a post or three from each of them and tell me they're not worth listening to.

Everyone is evil...

And you didn't make it past the second episode?

This is why the fanbase is deteriorating.

You could say that, or you might consider I follow Grace and Dan, giving me quality information to base my statements on without all the drek of having to actually watch a series decidedly not worth watching.

And now you know!
;D

Ah, front-loaded costs....
One thing not considered yet: Most Prime members are not signing up for just streaming. In fact, everyone I know who has Prime has it for reasons other than streaming and would still have it even if it didn't include streaming. So it RoP would really have to suck hard to get less than five seasons.

Yet Galadriel still pining for Halbrand/Sauron (never mind her EVER fallen for him in the first place!) is an astonishingly vapid take on Tolkien's legendarium. This show isn't just a soap opera, it's a particularly egregious take on one.

And don't even get me started on Gand-elf.... Ai! Ai! The pain is too great to bear!

Quark Blast wrote:

Every character in the show (unless they had a profound pervasive developmental disability and I missed that) was evil.

I almost agree with you on this point, but there were 2 exceptions. 1) The Yoda post credits cameo, he didn't say or do anything, but wasn't evil at least. And 2) the senator investigating the Jedi (not to mention a good actor) was the true hero of the show.

EDIT: Oh, and 3) the not on screen technician who created the Jedi metal detectors which could sense disturbances in the force, since none of the Jedi themselves in the show seemed to be able to. He was a pure hearted hero who clearly didn't get the credit he deserved.

Thank you for setting me straight, though you do the show no favors by detailing how I was wrong. At any rate, I'll assume you are correct on this. In my defense, I didn't make it past episode 2.

How has this show not been canceled?

Are they contractually obligated to continue even though every episode loses money?

I'm a big fan of the manga and anime and honestly the Live action did a great job. Yes they changed some stuff and skipped some stuff but the Important beats of the story are all there and the heart of the series is there.

It is probably one of the best Live action adaptations I've seen....

Fantastic casting. This show proves that one can adapt anything as long as they stick to the lore and characterizations given in the source material. This was so good I may buy the manga.

Also I hate how nobody can just talk about Star Wars anymore without people being weird and a bummer.

The Clone Wars is now a legendary part of canon.

I remember when it was weird, and lore breaking and people couldn't be normal about it either.

The Acolyte is "weird" because it's not Star Wars. The title says it is, but it's not. They may have the rights to the IP and have characters spew Star Wars jargon but that doesn't make it so.

George got plenty of push back on the first two prequel movies and JarJar took a backseat because of it. That and he toned down the miasma of FX by Episode 3, thankfully. As a kid, the only thing I really liked about Ep 1 was the pod race and I don't even remember the first time I watched Ep 2, but I can still recall the feels from the first time watching Ep 4-6.

The Acolyte could have grown and improved, but instead now the lead actress is getting harassed on social media while haters of the show crow and celebrate, particularly those that have some kind of problem with diversity in genre shows.

With Headland in charge, the answer is No! it could never have grown or improved. I don't know what her talents are but producing a Star Wars story is emphatically not among them.

As for the lead actress:
There is some real talent there and had the material been good I've no doubt Amandla's efforts would've gotten awards; or at least nominations.

As for the lead actress getting harassed:
Having put herself in the ring and thrown every dirty punch possible (dis track anyone?), I'd say a lack of sympathy is warranted.

Also, I think tv should be allowed to be mid sometimes. Acolyte had some sweet action scenes, character arcs that appealed beyond the normal demographic of these shows, interesting twists and plots.

Star Wars could be "mid" and it would still be like printing money. This show was not mid, it was not even low grade. That is got canceled is certainly the least surprising thing that's happened.

I think there can be disagreement on the overall execution, but I think more respect should be thrown on the level of ambition and love that was clearly heaped upon this show by its creators and contributors....

Respect is a two-way street. Also, the monumental hubris thrown out before the first episode dropped was a guarantee of fan clap-back. Just watch some of the promo clips/interviews - echoes of Rings of Power there.

Except neither twin is evil, and one might be a force clone, and they trade perspectives and do a parent trap/twin swap?

Every character in the show (unless they had a profound pervasive developmental disability and I missed that) was evil.

....When you aren't looking at Chewie he is loyal to Han. That is an essential quality of the character that persists accross space and time. You can't measure it, you can't weigh it, but its just as much a part of chewie as his fur. If Chewie is betraying han, you know it's a set up.

But these characters don't have that. They don't have a metanarative, a higher truth, or an existance beyond now. Whatever is happening now, is happening now, and that's IT. If someone has a cool idea for Chewie betraying han, in it goes!

It's horrible storytelling. It cannot build a character only destroy them....

Hopping over the heated discussion - it was good btw and the Wolf is right imho - I just had to reply to this statement.

Somewhere in the mass of promo interviews for this utter failure of a SW series I heard Leslye Headland state (brag? sounded like a brag to me but I was not paying especially close attention) that she specifically picked writers who knew nothing about the IP.

I watched the first episode, couldn't make it through the second, and my only memory of the experience is - What a waste of "Trinity".

I have one coworker who was all in until episode 7 and was left speechless after watching episode 8. Another coworker who believes the series got better with each episode and loved episode 7 only a little less than episode 8. I get the first coworker but I have absolutely no idea where the second person is coming from.... This show was like self-published teen fan fiction. I've seen more interesting writing on public bathroom walls*

* srsly! There was a poem on the wall of the first floor engineering building at uni that stayed there for years. Other graffiti got removed or painted over stat but this one, between the first and second urinal, was on the wall for over two years. Alas I didn't memorize or snap a pic but it was funny w/o being vulgar.

I think I've told this story before, but my favorite-ever story about architecture was an article I read just as I went into teaching: When AutoCAD went into widespread commercial use, catastrophic building failures tripled.

Not because it made mistakes, but because before it came out architects added fudge factors to make up for the possibility of mistakes... which also took care of unusual weather conditions or loads. AutoCAD assumed everything would always be perfect, built everything precisely to code... and things happened.

Reminds me of my job at my second engineering internship. I was tasked with organizing the archive that went back about 70 years. The digital realm was a mess, once that got organized I was tasked with going through the physical archive to look for "documents of record", and other important stuff, to then scan those into the digital library.

Back in the day everything was drawn by hand* and there were even literal blueprints in the collection (which, incidentally, had been folded a zillion times and were a test of patience to get them to scan properly and had stains from coffee mugs and other things on them).

For some reason they used MicroStation in the 1980's and 1990's. Switched to AutoDesk products in 1999 to the present. The MicroStation files were a bit of a mess but I could understand them mostly but I did notice that they had many backup copies of the same file - the record was 142 iirc - and never less than a dozen or so. Often fully half of them titled "FINAL - Job# - Job Name". They were engineers so I get the redundancy but how do you name every file "FINAL" and not confuse yourself?

When they went to AutoCAD it took them about eight years to use it right. There is an 8-year 'gap' of totally unusable files in the archive there. By law they have to keep some of that (I think) to pass audits but it would never pass a quality audit. I fear for the peeps that live/work in some of those buildings constructed using AutoCAD circa 1999-2007.

* BTW the hand-drawn documents were 1337!; those dudes knew how to make clean lines with relevant notation.

Why do programmers always mix up Christmas and Halloween?

Reminds me of the extra credit question from a final:

"There are 10 types of people in this world. Those who understand binary and those who don’t.
Please explain and show your work."

Finally made myself finish Night Watch by Terry Pratchett. Could've read it on lunches during my workweek but instead it sat around for more than a month now. One of the best time travel novels I've read - and I've read more than a few as my college roommate was positively obsessed with the sub-genre and I borrowed many; though I think this one escaped his notice somehow.

Pratchett's characters are much more rounded and the story was interesting to follow. His early stuff seems to be a series of clever one-liners linked by the barest thread of a plot line. I wonder if he just got better at writing or got a better editor. Writing, like painting and other arts, is a practice that gets better with age.

I will definitely look for his stuff in the future when I want an interesting distraction from the Idiocracy that our world has become.

To DQ's comments:
Yes! Inflation is pounding the *bleep* out of the box office receipts. Without a promotion I got at work late 2022, my effective buying power today would be about -20% what it was this time in 2020. COLAs in name only it seems.

In fact, the theater I saw this movie at (I was traveling last week), is for sale. Ha! Wouldn't own that for free my friend.

As for my own thoughts regarding the movie:
If not for Chris' performance, this would be one to wait for streaming. I liked the young Furiosa backstory, great new-to-me actress (who looks remarkably like ATJ) and that part is NOT too long, but they really could've shaved 20 or 30 minutes from the rest of the film. There were three times when I metaphorically looked at my watch.

Unlike Dune 2, the soundtrack for this movie pales in comparison to Fury Road, despite the same composer. If you take out the parts directly lifted from Fury Road, there's very little here to make you want a second listen.

There are some stunning shots, if a bit CGI-y in places. This looks like an OK movie made from the prep-work of a really great movie, which, it turns out, it was.

Overall, I might see it again someday incidentally. Also, it's hella depressing! Teddy Bear notwithstanding.
:\

My take, after watching the first two episodes (I may have fallen asleep once late in the first episode because when I awoke the second was just starting, though I seemed to have missed nothing relevant), is that Disney spent $180M trying to outdo the CW.... and failed!

:D

Maybe Carrie-Anne Moss commands $150M to appear in your TV show these days, or something like that, but even the FX was old-school bad. Like PS3 graphics bad, maybe some of the distant background was PS2 bad. Here, you decide using this handy comparison after watching an episode of The Acolyte for yourself.

And yeah, the plot is a "mystery". Something a 4th grader could latch onto but, like the current Garfield movie, not something to catch the attention of even young adults, let alone the rest of us.

Who gives a "green light" to these shows? How are they in the entertainment industry and not have the slightest clue what audiences might like? This guy seems to have it about right.

The IMBD score is presently 4.4 but even taking out the 'review bombs', all of them, and calculating the actual Mean (X-bar), we end up with a number close to 4.0.... yeesh!

A "saga" huh? Well ok then, I'm in!

This is getting good word of mouth and early reviews. Apparently this movie will rival Dune 2 for sound editing at the Oscars.

My dudes/dudets(?),

This is even worse. There is, after all, already a fan-fic film with the very same title. This one will only make you want 39 minutes of your life back.

Bjørn Røyrvik wrote:

The first two Discworld books are written before Pratchett had found out what he really wanted to do with the Disc and many fans (myself not among them) consider them not nearly as good as everything that came later and often skippable.

I'd concur with this summary. I think they're still fun, but the feel is very different between, say, Colour of Magic and Mort, even they're the first and fourth books, respectively....

Thanks Bjorn/Perp, I'll skip ahead a bit after finishing The Light Fantastic (just started it). Since the first book ended on a cliffhanger I just had to continue in publication order. For the next one I'll skip ahead a bit to a title that titillates. And I'll commit to reading three books - which far exceeds my interest in the other two Terrys; I forced myself to finish Goodkind (and failed!) so Brooks is solidly in second place with this three-way race.

Pratchett is quirky, I'll give him that. Does he have a book that is more philosophical, less of a blaze of one-liners and malapropisms?

.

Edit for Shannara:
When I said there was no grounds for the Tolkien estate to sue for plagiarism, I meant that in a technical sense. After all, Skull Mountain is certainly a stand-in for Barad-dûr and the Warlock Lord is essentially the Witch King of Angmar (not to mention that the Sword of Shannara is aka The Sword of Truth!.... so, Goodkind yoinked from Brooks too it seems), but just not in a way that could be argued in court to good effect.

Quark Blast wrote:

None-the-less, it's bragging by anyone's definition.

You're speaking on behalf of the other 15 of us in this thread, I take it?

Perhaps it would be more respectful to let us speak for ourselves, just in case we don't all agree with you.

Technically, I agree. However I need not fear this actually happening here.

Practically, this is the Internet - no one I've ever encountered here is so cowed by my confident pronouncements as to "let me" speak for them.

The fact that we have regular internet access to discuss things on this forums put us in an upper bracket of the populations anyway.

Globally? Yes, correct.

In the US/EU? Not so much.

Does the ability to travel from Georgia to San Francisco to see a concert put you in the top 1% wealth group?

To do so at the desperate whim of a teenager expressing the "need" to see a two-hour musical performance* by Babymetal? Emphatically yes!

* I'll admit their dance choreography is second to none compared to any of the K-pop I've seen.... so maybe worth the expense for someone below the 1%.... but still, unlikely.

Quote:

If you're saying that California is big enough that one can find good, even great, places to live outside the chaos, well OK then.

I greatly mislike casting aspersions, but that sounds like the conservative media talking. California isn't "chaos".

Point of reference for you to calibrate your aspersions:

Quote:

Also, why would your "entire family" go with you to wherever you retire? Won't most of them have a career and family of their own to consider? Did you follow your parents when they retired?

You asked me why I don't retire now. So, I just tell the kids, "You're on your own. Get out!" and I'm done?

What age were you when you left the nest?

I left to go to college with the understanding that I can return home if things go sideways for me but trusting I'd make choices to reasonably avoid that. The same treatment I believe both of my parents received from their parents.

I don't talk about the good because I was raised by parents who considered boasting the height of bad taste, so saying, "Oh, it's *SO* great here!" isn't something in my nature to crow about.

Well, I hate to inform you of this but.... you humble-brag about your intellectual prowess more than anyone I've ever encountered. Like, in detail explanations about the brilliance of your decision making and how you manage to help the less able around you come to your POV with concomitant brow-beating as necessary - albeit with an eye towards entertainment in the presentation.

None-the-less, it's bragging by anyone's definition.

As for the concert lady:
Yikes! Anyone who can travel from Georgia to Cali to take in a concert because her "daughter desperately wanted to see Babymetal live" has more money than 99.x% of Americans and so maybe isn't the best data point for what life is like in Cali in general.

I sometimes listen to a practicing+research MD who works in downtown SF and he was asked if things were really that bad there so many times that he jumped off topic just to answer that one.

His answer (paraphrased):
The neighborhood he lives in is amazing and he loves it. However he has stopped jogging into work as it has become impossible for him to avoid stepping in human excrement (literal - not pejorative) at a jogging speed. After one expensive pair of shoes became bio-toxic waste, he dropped them straight in the garbage can and now walks both directions. And yes, the downtown core is a shell of it's former self. And if the situation downtown spreads into his neighborhood he'll move and commute in a more traditional manner.

But again, this is the answer of someone who is a 99.x% income bracket American. So YMMV!
:D

Quark Blast wrote:

NobodysHome wrote:

Yeah, we were planning on retiring to Scotland but....

NobodysHome wrote:

For no logical reason that I can conceive of, our electric company (PG&E) prevents you from putting more solar than you use on your house....

And a 1,000 other like posts I will not dredge up and re-post with this querry:

You WFH, right?*

You've been full-time WFH for years, right? Like maybe two decades?

Why do you still live in CA?

Srsly, you could be retired already with the money you could've saved working remote under the jurisdiction of a more sensible (read: less bureaucratic) government.

Less optimal - At least retire out of state.

* Strictly speaking I'm asking questions that are not my business I know but you're posting to a public forum for all to read; and from this distance, and just the thousand or two of your posts I've read, I can't figure out why, with the means to live otherwise, you keep subjecting yourself to these billion little agonies.

My father put it well: California is the best place on Earth to live.

There's a reason it costs so much to live here. And I've read dozens of articles about Californians who've moved elsewhere only to find out that it costs just as much but just in different ways, or to learn that the lack of "California culture", for lack of a better term, is really depressing.

Plus family. I'm not going to upend the kids and destroy their social lives and abandon my wife's family just because California has irritations that I complain about. I can't name a single person who doesn't have some gripes about where they live.

TL; DR: I'd rather work longer and retire somewhere I and my entire family will be happy than retire now to somewhere we aren't.

If you're saying you would complain no matter where you lived, well OK then. If you're saying that California is big enough that one can find good, even great, places to live outside the chaos, well OK then.

Still, I don't identify enough with my job to put up with things I despise in order to keep it. And you may be working longer than you plan as Cali will need to tax somebody to cover the deficit they've ran up.

Also, why would your "entire family" go with you to wherever you retire? Won't most of them have a career and family of their own to consider? Did you follow your parents when they retired?

I'm OK that you like living in Cali, even though one could piece together a pretty good case that you don't from your own posts, but for someone so eminently logical in his rants, your preference for Cali makes no sense from here.

I watched Rebel Moon part 2.

Zack needs to surround himself with at least two people who can say "NO!" to him, and to whom he will listen. He also needs to empower a screenwriter who can craft a sleek and coherent story. And hire a primary camera operator who understands judicious use of slow-mo and will stand ground on that issue.

Otherwise, it looks great! But damn(!), I'll not be watching this one again and have my doubts the series will continue.

I saw this one in IMAX and I think one can save yourself a 10-spot and see it in a mid-range theater without missing anything.

It passed $700 million last week. It's an obvious Oscars contender. I can hardly wait for the next one. We will finally get to see guild navigators ala Villeneuve!

Still wending my way through the Terrys - Terry Goodkind, Terry Brooks, Terry Pratchett - and have just finished the Sword of Shannara and am about to start The Color of Magic.

Back to the former:
A few years back I watched the TV series The Shannara Chronicles on MTV/Spike/Paramount and, for the life of me, I'm at a complete loss as to what, besides character names, the showrunners chose to use for their adaptation. Some of the other material I suppose but, to me, the whole feel of the series seems only tangentially related to the books and was otherwise a garbled mess.

As for the book, Brooks doesn't rely as much on Tolkien as Goodkind did (no cause to claim plagiarism that I could tell) but the world-building is seriously lacking and the characters go from preternaturally savvy to maladroit n00b from one paragraph to the next, as the plot needs. The descriptions of combat, both of large battles in general and character melee, were a confounded mess. Here was a place Brooks could've borrowed more from the likes of Tolkien.

Final criticism, there was a marked use of trite language throughout. For example:
1) During a major battle, the characters could hear the enemy "cry out in pain.... and agony".
2) Earlier in the story, after a long march, the characters were "cold.... and tired".
3) Truly the language was often "hack.... and kneed". Etc.

Okay, maybe the third one wasn't in the book, and maybe my quotation marks should be scarce-quotes, but, my gods(!), where was the editor in this book writing process? And, yes, I'm aware that my own review has overwrought phrasing - I loves me some good sarcastic irony.

I won't be continuing my reading of Brooks unless someone can say he gets far better and name that book(s). Then I'll consider. Reviews at Amazon or Good Reads are notoriously hard to parse. One is better off simply looking at the number of reviews rather than the aggregate score. Though not so much at Amazon anymore as, now, one can "rate" the item without actually reviewing it. A change that increases clicks/engagement without a corresponding increase in the utility of the results - a concise summary of the Internet as a whole too. :D

On to The Color of Magic, I've heard good things about the late Pratchett. We shall see.

Yeah, we were planning on retiring to Scotland but....

For no logical reason that I can conceive of, our electric company (PG&E) prevents you from putting more solar than you use on your house....

And a 1,000 other like posts I will not dredge up and re-post with this querry:

You WFH, right?*

You've been full-time WFH for years, right? Like maybe two decades?

Why do you still live in CA?

Srsly, you could be retired already with the money you could've saved working remote under the jurisdiction of a more sensible (read: less bureaucratic) government.

Less optimal - At least retire out of state.

* Strictly speaking I'm asking questions that are not my business I know but you're posting to a public forum for all to read; and from this distance, and just the thousand or two of your posts I've read, I can't figure out why, with the means to live otherwise, you keep subjecting yourself to these billion little agonies.

I think I'll give a somewhat dissenting opinion.

I thought it was ok but no more than that.

Although I think a great many of my problems may well have been from the novel. I read the book so long ago that my memories are quite vague.

My biggest issue is that far too much got crammed into a single movie and, as a result, lots of it didn't really make much sense. It really needed to be a miniseries and not just 2 movies.

So at 5 hours and 20+ minutes between the two parts, these movies likely have more screen time than a 6-part mini series, what with all the standard intro/outro for each episode. Just say'n....

As an example, how the heck did the small guerrilla force rebels suddenly mount a huge army to attack and defeat a technologically more powerful foe literally half a world away? How the heck could they achieve surprise when there are people looking down from space?

What Werthead said. Also, Paul has clear prescience after he imbibes the worm piss at the southern temple. Which also explains why the final battle is a dawdle.

I've always hated the trope that people raised in very harsh environments magically become superhuman warriors, both individually and at an organizational level. It is just so incredibly not true.

Toss in all the eugenics garbage and poorly explained mystical stuff and I was left confused much of the time.

What Werthead said. Also, we do eugenics now.... only we call it "personalized medicine", and "patient provided additional healthcare coverage", and "biotech", and "the great society", and a thousand other small and large endeavors among our sciences (hard, social and in-between) in our attempt to fool nature and stave off extinction.

Frank Herbert was trying to teach things he learned about humanity through his stories. Things like, if we don't fundamentally change who we are, we will destroy ourselves. Ultimately, Paul's son asserts that, at the end of the Golden Path, humanity's best option is to bundle up in like-minded groups and flee far-far away*, in every direction, until the end of time. A pragmatic, if cynical, solution.

* And "far-far away" means not just interstellar but intergalactic distances.

Good feedback on Goodkind. Thanks everyone!

You may also get annoyed with his "Richard Rahl always makes the 'right' choice, even if there is no way he would know about it" deus ex machina.

Well, I didn't finish the book but I could see that things regularly tricked Richard's way. Magic was weird too - very Vancian - and also seemed to work just the way the plot needed it to at the moment.

One other complaint I forgot to mention:
There were names like D'Hara, Zeddicus Zu'l Zorander, Darken Rahl and Kahlan. Then there are names like Richard and Samuel and a female red dragon named.... wait for it.... Scarlet. So he either ripped off the former names from somewhere I'm unfamiliar with or he had good days and bad days when coming up with character names.

On the positive side:
Parkinson's cover art is, as my dad sometimes says when being annoying, mad dope. Maybe that sold a few copies of the books as well.

Masks are more placebo than an actual deterrent. Go nuts if you want to wear one but they won't keep you from getting sick.

Just saying.

Just like birth control methods, I'll take "some protection" over "no protection" every time.

One would think that gamers, of all people, would get the odds one needs to beat with a mask.

Over the PA.... "May the odds be ever in your favor."

:D

In theory, all three batteries should have drained at the same rate.

In practice, I always check batteries when I pull them in case any are still good and the three were at 0%, 20%, and 80% respectively. A far cry from theory.

New Theory:

Rotate car tires ∴ rotate remote batteries.

Makes sense.

Given facial recognition's infamously bad track record on people with darker skin...

TSA is going all in on this tech as well and, iirc, during the pandemic some real headway was made in getting this to work while the subject is wearing a mask. Heck, the Chinese have perfected ID-ing you from behind, fully clothed, walking down the street.

Waggles fingers.... says in a soothing voice.... AI is your friend. Things are going to be alright.

Saw it at an unlikely hour to reduce the headcount. My plan worked and there were only twelve of us at the zero-hundred hour showing.

Three word review:
Good beyond hope.

I've talked with a couple of people who were annoyed that Alia was nerfed but then I thought, while the complaint is valid, as long as the presentation adapts the material in a way consistent with the world as presented in the novel, then one just has to leave room to let art be art and be at peace with the fact that one form is fundamentally different from another. In short, that's why they call it an adaptation.

So as to not dredge up a 14 year old thread on the subject I'll just state here:

By far most 'classic' SciFi series were published before my time and I hardly have enough time to read them all. So I took a little time and crawled the Internet to take a gander at a large number of "Best of all-time" lists various entities had published. Culling from those got me a short list of perhaps a hundred books/series.

Starting with the Sword of Truth (Terry Goodkind).... and I must say it was a rough start. How the ####! did this author make so many lists? His evil characters are deeply sadistic with motivations verging on the comically putrid. Even the "good guys" act alarmingly vindictive and seem perversely motivated. That, and every adult ("good guys" and bad), in every instance, come off as creepers when they have conversation with minors. Oh, and the character Samuel - how did he not get sued by the Tolkien estate for that patent ripoff of Gollum? Nope, I'm done with this series before finishing the first book.

On to the Sword of Shannara by Terry Brooks. I've seen the TV series - all two abortive seasons - but I won't hold that against the book until I read it anyway.

A somewhat spoilery clip from the movie, released 10 days ago, strongly supports the now common view among early viewers of the whole movie that Dune part 2 will be better than Dune part 1 and, like Jackson's LotR movies, will set the standard for 'hard' SciFi going forward over the next few decades.

Less than a month away!

People who've seen it are saying it's great. I can hardly wait.

Edit:
last official trailer

Well..... there's always hope for part 2 coming later this year. Especially if they lean into Jimmy. But it looked really, really nice!

:D

I tried to like it. I couldn't. It's just sooo poorly written - a real disservice to the actors, the lead especially. If anything they reached for could've been done better, I think leaning more into ASL and letting the uninitiated use subtitles would've been neat.

As usual, the Pitch Meeting rather nails the issues at a gloss. The Drinker, though more surly and less generally well received, gives fair criticism this time as well.

Countdown three days on the other side of the pond!

Countdown ten days for those of us over here.

When Grace Randolph declared Ms Marvel (and her familia) to be the best thing about the movie, I knew it wasn't for me. My cousin and his wife confirmed this decision (because they are the biggest Marvel fans I personally know and they told me to wait for streaming after seeing it in IMAX).

Movies this year have been rather thin gruel for the most part.

Billion $ movies in 2019 = 9 (7 from Disney!)

Billion $ movies in 2023 = 2 (0 from Disney!)

The Spiderverse is plugging along nicely (can hardly wait for the third one) but as a cartoon it's going to have limited appeal.