Zoraptor

Honestly, I think the biggest reason for the LOTR show is Jeff Bezos' ego and a desire to add prestige to his rather shabby business empire (bit like his obsession with space, really, though without the practical aspect of him flying off to the moon or whatever once the earth has become covered with extraneous amazon wrapping from tacky plastic nick knacks). He's always wanted Amazon to be #1 in everything, including streaming, it's only once they're #1 and have the competition hobbled that the money making takes over. It's been Amazon's #1 tactic since getting big to use profits in one area to subsidise another which is losing money while they drive the competition there out of business. Bundling the streaming with other more desirable services is, er, prime Amazon tactics, and parachuting in a well known IP with a built in fanbase is an obvious approach. So overall the LOTR show looks like a classic loss leader, ie not actually designed to make money but to get attention. Even just the rights are ludicrously expensive- and they were happy enough to sit on them until Christopher Tolkien was no longer a problem. They did a huge amount of prelim work on the initial 'Young Aragorn' concept that all went into the circular file once they got the rights to 2nd Age when C Tolkien stepped back (and later died). Will be interesting to see if the focus on big budget stuff lasts since Amazon as a whole probably doesn't have too many illusions about driving Netflix or Disney out of business and Bezos is at least theoretically gone; so it will be a battle of how much money it loses vs the hit to Amazon's prestige a cancellation would have. (99% chance its bad fanfic writing is the problem, but its failure gets blamed on black hobbits triggering incels or something)

If I were generous I'd count her impersonation of alt universe bondage Tilly back in S1 as some sort of diplomatic mission, at least. Wheel of Time ep5: TLDR; not a fan of this one at all, possibly worse than Ep1. Changes stuff that doesn't need changing, badly unfocused, and then doesn't change stuff that actually does need changing because you've changed other stuff. Note: includes fairly extensive book spoilers this time

Wait, what. How can you list weird and wonderful things from Dune 1984 without mentioning Sting's batarang codpiece? It's the single most memeorable thing from the entire movie, and the second most memorable codpiece in entertainment after the Black Russian.

In utterly unsurprising news, Omicron has been detected in European samples from before its first official detection in RSA. In utterly utterly unsurprising news, despite this the west have travel bans from southern African countries, most of which have zero detected omicron, and no travel bans for all the western countries that definitely have it. So yeah, South Africa being punished for being competent and transparent, and Euros suffering nothing from their lack of competency and their opacity*. I may poke fun at the WHO for their pandering to China (no Xi variant as it would embarrass a certain corpulent honey loving Chinese leader) and India (switching to greek letters when an Indian variant would embarrass Modi) but there was a good reason for it when the rest of the world is all Trumpian 'just test less' to avoid being the first country to find it. As always, a big thanks to that cretin von der Leyen**- and to Germany, for kicking its embarrassments upstairs- for blocking the removal of vaccine patents, allowing more spread and more variants with more mutations. Great news for German company BionTech though, especially if there's immune escape, and that's the important thing... *should have been detected earlier, you can bet that any EU country larger than Luxemburg is doing more sequencing than RSA is. Wouldn't be in the least bit surprising if they were holding off on an announcement to avoid the negative press. **though it seems the waiver may be coming now and it is better late than never, and to be fair to the EU the Euro Parliament voted for it. In true "wouldn't be allowed into the EU itself, for being undemocratic" EU style it was the autocratic/ undemocratic level of career incompetencies on the top that was blocking it.

Royal snakes. Thank me later.

Yep. You could easily have positively charged electrons instead of negative- presumably it's true arbitrary so a 50% chance of either, though you'd never actually know since they'd translate into our language/ scientific perception- so long as you then have negatively charged protons, that's an arbitrary difference based on language much like north and south magnetic poles. But an electron will always have the opposite charge from a proton whatever the charge is called, and the poles of a magnet will always be opposite whether you call them north and south or Neville and Steve. You cannot have hydrogen with a proton and a positron, and you can't muck around with universal constants (typically because if you do, everything stops working spectacularly; hence the deep philosophical observation that the universe works because if it didn't we would not be here to know about it). Different cultures or species may call them different things, perceive them differently (an obvious example being synethesia and the ability to 'see' music some have) and express them differently but they're interpretations of the same physical phenomena.

Seems a bit odd the WHO decided to skip two iterations in the naming scheme and use Omicron. OK, so there would be interminable jokes about the Nu/ new variant if they named it that much like all the Windows? Nein! jokes we so sadly missed out on due to MS skipping an iteration. Guess they must have skipped the other one because they thought people might confuse it with any upcoming Chi variant. Can't think of any other reason they wouldn't want people talking about the Xi variant.

Yeah, the biggest specific issues stem from divergence from the books. Which is inevitable, the series is fundamentally unfilmable as is even if they got the extra 2 episodes per season. Trying to shoehorn literally chapters of world building with internal monologue and observation into a visual medium is difficult, but has too often been unnecessary or overly blatant. Don't even know if it could have been done better, but that's largely irrelevant to whether you enjoy the end product. Which I largely am, but it's certainly got a lot of rough edges and it's easy to understand people who aren't enjoying it. OTOH I'd say that their biggest general problem is budget, and how cheap it looks- or at least how inconsistent it looks. The CGI is mostly fine, the locations are uniformly good and I at least don't have (many) issues with the costuming- even the tinkers were closer to what they 'should' have been in ep4. But each episode there's been at least one thing where it looks like they ran out of money, and the end effect of that is like buying a silk shirt and finding that one sleeve is polyester. Doesn't matter how good the rest is, you really notice the cheap part even if you wouldn't mind wearing a straight polyester shirt. So specifically for ep4 (really mild spoilers, but for safety)

Yeah, that was a pretty good episode. There's still issues with the approach taken but they're far more background niggle level and nitpicking now, and the pacing is just so much better post ep1. Don't think that's quite as much as a cultural phenomenon as that reviewer had it being, but certainly a lot closer than anything before. But then there's one thing that really drags the episode down massively...

Rumours do have there being a lot of flashbacks, and there's a decent amount of independent evidence for there being a lot: Yep, they finished photography for S1 here about 6 months ago. Expected to drop sometime in February, I think.

That's our closedown message. To think there's a whole generation of kiwis who haven't seen it. Great piece of kiwiana, like Huntly's DEKA sign, or the town of Gore.

Except, ironically, for the Tinkers who really should be colourful but are instead more dull and restrained than the books.

Yeah, I mentioned Amaresu a few pages back. She's only mentioned twice in the books in relation to being a Hero of the Horn, it's meta from Jordan that has her as the female Dragon equivalent.

Dunno what the point of that even was, somehow managed to be tepid and cringey (much like Moiraine and Lan's bath). You're told they're all ~20 a couple of times in dialogue. And that really is the problem with the 1st episode, so many of those changes took up time but weren't needed. Yeah, Egwene going for an involuntary swim is a metaphor for channeling saidar. Book readers don't need that though, and watchers don't have the context to 'get' it. Same with the 'rumours of 4 ta'veren'* line. Book readers go wtf? because that's contextually a stupid rumour while watchers go wtf? because they have no idea what ta'veren even is. *

There was DirectStorage which should have been a decent boost, but apparently it's coming to Win10 as well now as of July. So that leaves AutoHDR and- lol- xbox app integration as win11 exclusives gaming wise at least. Otherwise... it can run android apps? Yet another GUI reorganisation? Not really much, but then most of its features probably weren't originally intended to be a full OS iteration and that was forced by the hardware requirements, ie they didn't want win10A for old computers and win10B for new ones so we got Win11 instead.

Classic Mahmoud. Pronouncements on the imminent collapse of western civilisation just haven't been the same since he left the presidency. And of course, the most random weird and interesting thing about that World Cup was not Paul but which team went through it unbeaten

Finished up The Expanse S5 which I suspended right at the start of the year when my free primevideo sub ran out. Overall, it was okay in the end but nowhere near as good as earlier seasons. The biggest feeling I'm left with though is that it really should have been better.

And some comments from him on Wheel of Time Ep2. I did have some reflection on one thing I really didn't like from ep1 re Laila Aybara (with book spoilers for any tv only viewers)

Bots buying up all the silicone now? What will they think of next. I do very much love a good silicon/e typo, always brings me a smile. To be frank, I don't think the price inflation we have now is here to stay longer term, or in any way sustainable. A bit of price inflation, sure, because newer node fabrication really is intrinsically a more expensive process than older ones, whereas historically smaller newer nodes were more efficient (and hence cheaper) fabrication wise as well as in the end product. But the levels of pricing and neither AMD nor nVidia having had new entry level cards for years is unsustainable long term no matter how great it looks on the bottom line of today's quarterly report. I'd expect ludicrously priced halo products to hang about though, since there clearly are a lot of people willing to pay those prices. But at some point they have to cater to those that aren't, or lose them, and the alternatives- MSony- are only going to get cheaper and more available as other companies come off 7nm and space frees up.

Even non genre fans will know about it, basically. It'll be the semi legendary thing known as 'water cooler talk'. GoT wise it would something like the ending to ep1 with Jaime giving Bran a demonstration of defenestration, Ned getting Ilyn Payned or most notably (and of course far later comparatively) the Red Wedding. A big hook to draw in a more general audience and make it need to see TV.

They'd have to expect them to leak, way too many reviewers got the 6 eps rather than 3. I would reiterate that the first 3 are good enough that I'll keep watching, despite my quibbles and more significant dislike of ep1. I'd be pretty sure that they're aware of it, at least. Some of the xray stuff was pretty detailed and explained the differences from the books, and you really cannot miss the Arthurian (or Jesus) parallels in the books without being deliberately obtuse about it. It not being a priority to show is perfectly understandable though, as are things like having Thom sing a very thinly veiled song about the Dragon instead of their legendary stories based on our history. (and on the subject of the real world bases for their legends I always assumed that the 'Salya' story was Salyut, the first space station. Not being American I only knew about Tereshkova and had literally no idea who Sally Ride even was apart from her being in a line from "We didn't start the fire" until I checked if there was any more real world references in the books and they all say that it's a reference to Sally Ride instead. I'd fight the ghost of RJ over it)

Well yeah, but it wouldn't actually matter if the show population there was black, asian or indian so long as it was more or less consistent. The only thing they should have avoided for plot reasons was having the town look like a Bennetton advert, which of course they did because posturing > plotting. otoh (mild ep3 spoilers) (Ironically having the stereotypical 'woke' racial diversity quota in somewhere as isolated as the Two Rivers could only happen- in reality- if the races close to only bred within themselves. Not exactly what the typical adherent of wokeness would want to be implying And for anyone wondering why, apart from genetics the major factors are isolation and slow transportation speeds, and not having any disposable income. You'd get diversity in sea ports and major cities especially on major trade routes or rivers, small villages though would be little i inbred as anything and the vast majority of the population would live and die close to where they were born)

It's very much the visual style that is derivative of the lotr movies. The plot and appearance of the Two Rivers is actually a lot less LOTResque than the source material. Anyway, WoT ep3- nested spoiler would be pretty big for a non book reader so be warned

Non spoiler WoT TLDR: Ep1 is decidedly meh. Ep2 is far, far better. And I haven't watched Ep3 yet. If there's one problem that looks like it's going to linger it's that the whole thing looks like Great Value LOTR trilogy I don't think there are any serious spoilers, but I'm not going to be too careful about obfuscation so... Ep1: Ep 2: And look at that, I managed to get through it without a single comparison to Game of Thrones. I should win a prize.

Yep, that's how I usually do it if a quote doesn't work, but it isn't working. The straight link was the last thing I tried. (Firefox has a pending update and hasn't been shut down for ages, that's probably the reason for it. Can't discount Kurzman having shares in xenforo and messing with me though)