Bartimaeus

As it relates to making painfully obtuse and unlikeable characters that are being framed in a terrible light and just don't seem to be the right fit for their setting, it should not surprise anyone in the slightest: it is the very same drum I have been beating for positively ages now. Of course not: usually, someone's appearance is the first thing you see, and there's typically no harm in drawing upon your knowledge of patterns and beginning to formulate thoughts and impressions about that person, though they should ideally be thoughts and impressions lightly held that can be easily overturned given evidence to the contrary of what you initially felt. When your first thoughts are always "ooga booga big booba", that's when we start to have problems: I did not know I was signing up for a series apparently aimed at cavemen. I have never in my entire life read any other series that was so keenly focused on the things that Robert Jordan seemed to be, and for all his ability to draw me into a world and for me to actually finish the series, I hope I never do so again, because it is unpleasant and unnecessary...among the many other issues with his writing. In a world where girls and women never had any reason to ever worry about their personal appearances, either because they have the power not to, or because societal pressures are drastically different, do I believe that at least some if not most of them would not care, or that at least their behaviors revolving around such would be different? Uh, yes, yes I do. Why are they obsessed with how they present themselves and their perceived flaws? I have and do know women who don't give a ****, possibly against their 'objective' best interests, but because the price of socially conforming doesn't outweigh the costs in their time, effort, and money to do so. For goodness sake, a huge percentage of recent generations in Western society consider body hair on girls/women to be gross and unnatural. Body hair. That which literally 99.99% of us all have...naturally. That which signifies going through puberty, physical and sexual development/maturity. It's so ingrained into their thinking that girls viciously bully other girls over it, literally to the point of girls killing themselves! Why? You think that's just...a natural behavior, even though it's very obviously not always been true throughout even recent history? No, man, I'd say that's a load of crap supported by a whole bunch of other loads of crap, just like most of what we're discussing here. The idea that this is just how girls/women are and always will be regardless of historical/sociopolitical/cultural/economic reasons, or power dynamics, or an other number of things, seems so obviously silly and farcical that I can't believe we're having a discussion about it. So yes, if you write a world with completely different social structures that seem in drastic opposition to our real world ones, I do expect the people in those social structures to behave at least somewhat differently than if you didn't. Perhaps it might even be an integral part of someone's fictional fantasy setting and world, I don't know.

I've now had two people say I should like it, and two people say I'll hate it. An exhilarating curiosity indeed: who are the fools amongst me?

Well, I'm certainly not going to re-read the entire series to determine whether or not all of Jordan's awful framing of women is limited to just the male characters, I'll give you that - especially seeing as I disliked or outright hated reading most of the female characters' parts. I guess the lesson there is that I should just hate all the male characters, too? Not really helping, I'm afraid. No offense, but what does any of that have to do with The Wheel of Time? Is this a fictional high fantasy setting predominantly ruled by women set in a medieval era (i.e. completely unlike our own), or the real world? Are you honestly saying that many girls/women's preoccupation with their personal appearances is...inherent to them, and not a reflection of the kind of society that we presently live in (and who the ones that raised us and who raised them have historically lived in), the values and behaviors foisted upon them as they develop from a young age? You don't think the dynamics might be a little different in a society with opposite social structures and values? See, that's kind of exactly my problem: here are all these great and powerful women living in a women-dominated society...and yet, it can't help but feel like it was all written from the point of view of a guy who clearly did not have the appropriate breadth of perspective to really do any of it justice, to escape the trappings of his own very limited world experiences and upbringing. And for a guy writing this kind of massive fictional world that has so much focus on those exact things, it's kind of a problem. (e): @uuuhhii chimed in while I was writing this and helped further illustrate my problem here as well. No, I would not say that my immediate thoughts every time I see a person (actually, really specifically just the girls or women, because the boys and men would usually get described in a much different manner that sounded way less "HOW MUCH OF A HOT BABE IS SHE?") for the first time is precisely evaluating their measure of beauty. It will very much depend on the precise circumstances. For example, if a woman upon a horse galloped into my vicinity, I can tell you that the first thing I wouldn't do is immediately notice how round her damned boobs are and that she's pretty and maybe even beautiful but her nose is just too big...and this is coming from the perspective of another female character - thank you very much, book 8, literally one queen meeting another queen in a political meeting. Fantastic writing, so well-framed and intentioned, . I really don't think it matters if a given girl or woman can identify with a female character from The Wheel of Time, which I already talked about in my previous post: there are many real world women that can unironically identify with a number of female characters from very questionable narratives in the Old Testament, and there are many people whose favorite films have themes and messages completely opposite to their own values that they completely ignore or are blind to, either intentionally or unintentionally: it's of no matter, people enjoy and identify with what they do for whatever arbitrary reasons, and that's perfectly fine. Now if someone else's actual analysis can meaningfully explain why and thereby possibly convince me elsewise, that's a whole different thing. And never mind that even that is limited to the purview of just a single character rather than the writing and framing of the series as a whole: I can love and identify with a character from a series I explicitly think is bad and/or has subversive values as well, it really doesn't mean much.

Sweetie (1989). If all I knew of Australia was this film, I would have to think that they're all deeply disturbed and neurotic. But the truth is that I know they're all deeply disturbed and neurotic independent of watching this film, so watching it was completely unnecessary, albeit very amusing.

I would say that Jordan's writing is pretty anti-feminist, and I'd be pretty shocked if any serious feminists thought much anything positive of the vast majority of Jordan's writing specifically through that lens. Like, okay, they are strong, and most of them reside in female-dominated or at least female-equal societies...which sounds good on its face, unless, you know, pretty much everything that they do is bad/irritating/misguided/wrong-headed/stereotypical and most of them are all annoying idiots constantly. It doesn't help if everyone seems to have this bizarre obsession with thinking about their bosoms, or that they're all constantly making sure that they're currently pretty/presentable, never mind how they demean and humiliate each other (sometimes literally institutionally or ritualistically!), or that they're always trying to 'control' men, or that men seem to always have to eventually 'force' the women to see sense for their own good...all that kind of bullcrap that Jordan wrote and the rather explicitly negative way that it's all framed makes it pretty damned obvious how Jordan feels about women. Just letting them be "strong" absolutely does not equate to 'feminism' - you're going to have to do a little more homework than that to convince me of any feminist leanings. Mind you, that doesn't mean a reader, female or male, couldn't be inspired by or love a given female character for any number of reasons...or that there aren't literally any pro-feminist ideas (obviously there are!), but on the whole, with the way Jordan framed his writing throughout the entirety of the series? No, I don't bloody well think so. Every woman I've talked to about Wheel of Time that has tried this series (or even read its entirety!) has mentioned how awful the vast majority of Jordan's female characters and societies are and we've had long discussions about how stupid and annoying all of it is, so I'm inclined to believe them and myself that there is indeed something very seriously wrong. Oh yeah, and I just did a cursory look-up of "Wheel of Time feminism", and there's all sorts of other discriminative nasties that Jordan baked into his writing that you might well ignore while just reading casually, but really don't stand up to scrutiny. Like, lmao, men must take control of and master the One Power, while women must...submit to the One Power? Or how women's appearances are always being described in terms of how beautiful (or not) they are (already bad!), and if there's anything less than ideal about them, there's explicit mention about whatever that is (double bad!)? It's pretty gnarly stuff through and through. Fantasy: No idea, don't ask me for recommendations on fantasy, I gave up on the genre like a decade ago because of how frustrated I was getting with it, so it's not really my wheelhouse in the first place. Most all I care about is characters and having stories being organically driven by them, and for that reason, I will repeat once again: Robert Jordan is a literature terrorist...whose books I happened to mostly enjoy upon the first read. I once tried to restart reading the series again and couldn't get past even the first book without having the draw of learning more about the story to power me through, which is a most curious phenomenon indeed - it's almost always once I am not so pre-occupied with the details of the story or what's literally happening that I truly start to enjoy something, which is why second reads/watches of something that I really liked is often when I know that I loved something, as I can focus on the little things and fun character stuff. Yeah, no dice for The Wheel of Time, it just got exponentially more annoying instead.

You know, you could've just started with the "driving drunk" bit and I would've already said "good". Still waiting for the consequences of continuing to do everything he's not supposed to do, seemingly but hopefully not actually forevermore...the wheels of justice just seem to be too slow for a creature like Trump.

. . . Well, actually, okay, if you start at the absolute bottom like you do with Book!Elayne, it does make sense that there's practically infinite room for improvement and you can really only improve the character - heck, even a small improvement can honestly go a long ways. Like, just don't have her be a total dip**** literally one hundred percent of the time, and you've already massively improved her character from the book version. I went back and forth with Egwene as the series went on, but yes, Faile is the worst, Berelain is the worst, Aviendha is the worst...however, Elayne is the worst of the worst. There is something about her that makes my brain short circuit to the point where I eventually just started skipping her chapters wholesale. Even Nynaeve with Jordan writing about her braid tugging approximately every nanosecond didn't make me that mad. Robert Jordan was a literature terrorist for a number of reasons, but especially because of his female characters: never before and never again will there ever be such a sorry lot of 'strong' female characters so worthy of summary executions. It's a marvel that I made it all the way through the series and even mostly enjoyed it with his atrocious writing and characters: sometimes, you still enjoy something in spite of just about everything being wrong with it.

visual reference in case anyone has forgotten don't forget, or I'll have to post these again hopefully egwene immediately falcon punched her right outta the show

I, Tonya (2017). Well, whoops. I did not realize this was supposed to be an unreliable narrator comedy-ish mockumentary thing going in. I get that the film is more about the infamous Nancy Kerrigan knee-breaking hitman incident rather than the woman herself, but...I don't know, I think that approach kinda left me a bit cold, felt like the film was constantly undercutting itself as well as Tonya, which I really think is a shame when you have this great woman in her messed-up, tragic story. Her entire life seemed to be an endless series of failures and humiliations while almost everyone around her let her down and abused her at every turn, but the film kind of treats her like she's the butt of the joke until right at the end, where the film suddenly wants you to treat her and what she went through seriously. Didn't quite gel for me.

Man, I thought the 14700k review yesterday was already bad, the 14900k is straight up a scam.

That particular line was something said by Trump himself in the wake of the 2020 election, so no surprise to see morons parroting it. I'm so sorry that all of us don't treat politics akin to cheering for our favorite sports team...or as if Biden were the head of our cult religion, .

Alone in the Wilderness (2004). I saw this rank in the top 15 of a consensus-derived list of the greatest films of all time and decided to watch it. It's a 57 minute video shot on hand-cranked film of a guy making a cabin and then living in said cabin. It's basically a Bob Ross painting video, but about a cabin and surviving in the wilderness. There's apparently a sequel that is also somehow exactly 57 minutes.

Don't think I'd ever even heard of the Venture Bros. before today, and now I've come across it twice in different places. Odd. Edit: I decided to watch two episodes, worst show I've ever seen, but probably not worse than all the ones I haven't.

They Live (1988). I talked myself into watching this again, because I thought I must've missed something the first time when I watched it years ago. My experience now is my experience from back then: I am bewildered. From the very beginning, it's...pointedly serious, awkward, slow, and ham-fisted. There's this constant gratuitous lingering in how shots are filmed, and there's so much camera A to camera B back to camera A, repeat, repeat, repeat until what the film is trying to tell you (and it's not exactly subtle!) has been bashed into your skull. It's as if someone without even a shred of subtlety or respect for their audience directed it...or maybe the director just had a sense of humor that is completely alien to me. I want to like this, because it's John Carpenter and the premise is fun and I even like what the film is trying to say (especially in the context of when this was made, the end of the Reagan era), but...I just do not get it. I can see why people mostly seem to remember the silly pro wrestling fight. That got a snort of derision out of me. Does have a fun score, though. No, I don't think I will: I was barely "fine" with this one as it is. Fairly certain I would like any even passingly similar entries by the same filmmakers significantly less. Oh, it would be even funnier if the tagline was something they themselves made up for the cover. I honestly should've heavily questioned the film right then and there just for including that. Useless subtitles is a real pet peeve of mine as well. Why would you want to distract me from what's going on when it doesn't even aid my understanding of what's being said?

Well, I'm pretty certain that whom I was remembering was not Trump, although boiling him down to just "some Republican politician" that I can't really remember would be pretty funny, unintentional as it was.

I distinctly remember some Republican politician, though I don't remember whom exactly, fairly early on intoning something to the effect of "if we would just stop testing for covid, there'll be less covid". It was at that exact point that I realized that at least some states were, suffice to say, very likely to have less accurate data than other states.

The Marriage of Maria Braun (1979). Got fifteen minutes into it and was like "man, this German film sure is...German", and then turned it off. I'm sure it's O.K., but...nah, wasn't feeling it. So instead of a German film, why not go Austrian? Ich Seh, Ich Seh AKA Goodnight Mommy (2014). It starts off as a very obvious "our parent is an imposter!" kind of psychological horror film, but it's really just a cover for being a different and only mildly less obvious kind of psychological horror film. I think I liked it a little more than Martyrs, which I feel is a rather similar kind of film, if stylistically quite different. Don't know a lick of German, but @majestic, does the tagline on the poster say "The Shining for a New Generation"? Bit of a sham of a tagline if so - you'd have to be utterly daft to compare them in any way.

British film Peeping Tom (1960). I watched this on a total whim while knowing virtually nothing about it going in, as I'd only taken a quick look at the poster, and to be honest, it's not a particularly remarkable one. So all I expected was a very tame 'thriller' that'd be able to put my insomniac brain to sleep, and for the first ten minutes, that's more or less what I thought I was getting. It was not what I got. Great film that accomplished the exact opposite of what I wanted it to, but I can't really complain about that. It's kind of wild that this came out the same year as Hitchcock's Psycho, though it was across the pond in a film industry that was in a bit of a different place compared to Hollywood.

Nadia: The Secret of Blue Water: The Secret of Fuzzy: The Motion Picture: The End of Nadia: The Secret of Blue Water (1991). No, really, that's the real title. Okay, wait, no, I lied, I added "The End of Nadia: The Secret of Blue Water". Anyways, I completely forgot that there was a movie to end the series, though it's a film everyone says is very bad and that it's basically a scam. Well...pictures can speak volumes in this particular case, I think. This is how the show started: ...and this is how the movie's ending it: Enough said, right? It can be pretty rough sailing when they break out the D or F team to make the end to a series.

You know, I don't ever remember wanting to kill any children in BG1 and BG2, where you actually can, but all of these games where you can't, there's always at least one that I definitely did. Kind of feels like a chicken-or-the-egg situation: did they give children immortality because they realized their child characters were so annoying that they needed immortality to make sure that players weren't heartlessly slaughtering children en masse, or did they oh so smugly develop all these annoying child characters with the foreknowledge that there's absolutely nothing that the player can do about them? Regardless, I think it'd be a good idea for developers to remember that players will want to mutilate and butcher children if they're too annoying, incentivizing those developers to write them appropriately with that firmly in mind.

Yeah, it doesn't seem to matter if the very little that Republicans want to do (and there really is not much they seem to want to specifically accomplish, which is not surprising for a party that does not currently have any clearly defined platform besides some "we hate x, y, and z" bullet points...and also we love guns) is actually completely counterproductive to helping the people suffering the most, the point is to make those voters identify with you and have them feel like they belong and that their grievances are legitimate and perhaps that they even accomplished something important by voting you in. Whether they believe genuine problems will be solved, or if it's just stemming the tide of evil, hurting the "right" people, ending 'wokeness' or some other kind of lunacy - it doesn't really matter, not so long as they tie feeling better about their life and the state of the world to their side winning. That's a very strong and rather intangible feeling that's hard to quantify or argue against, so no surprise that there's not a lot of movement among the believers no matter how objectively laughable the results were under Trump and Republicans.

Yes, but only for the thread creator (i.e. as part of the first/original post). To be honest, I didn't have the particulars of that question pinned down when I posted it (I was kind of just mildly and indirectly clowning on the Cowboys getting absolutely steamrolled by the 49ers, which I can obviously do without any issue because unlike the Cowboys, the Packers have just been so good against the 49ers in recent history), but I think what I was going for was basically...you know, he was a nobody in the draft but he seems to actually be pretty good, but he also has such a fantastic team around him and he's still so young, it just seems difficult to fully understand how good he may or may not be at this particular moment, so hey, given the similar unique set of circumstances Tom Brady faced early on his career, it seemed like an obvious (if completely silly) question to ask. If he and the 49ers win the Super Bowl this year, that'd really be an uncanny parallel what with Tom Brady also winning a Super Bowl in his second year.

Poll Is Brock Purdy the Next Tom Brady? Yes No Maybe So

my ears, man all the audio is straight up dumped into the left side and it is badly clipping, but...but on the other hand, there is no piano music 6/10, would prefer if they were less technically incompetent at making trailers (e) Wait, this wasn't an official trailer, just some rando who made a clip. Okay, I guess I can't put the blame on the people working on the show for that. Still, if the guy that made/uploaded the clip doesn't have a good explanation for why it's so bad, off with their head and all that.

Ooh, fleas on rats, fleas on rats.