Kal-El814

I think I watched the series on Blu-ray and IIRC a bunch of the menus and stuff had questions about the mysteries of the show that... the show didn't end up addressing or were red herrings. So yeah I suppose the fans did it to themselves but it's also something the marketing team ran with and encouraged, it didn't come out of nowhere.

Fair enough. I haven’t read any of the books with her in them since they were initially released I think? Probably? I hope I feel differently about her now.

Her, "why won't you treat me like dirt, daddy," vibe got old.

Yeah so far I think Jordan was shooting for a rakish prankster, which... kinds works to establish who he is in Emonds Field. But there's just no reason for him to be all "OOOOH TREASURE" when Creepfest Magoo is baiting them into the Randland equivalent of an unmarked van. Spoilers for... a lot of stuff from later books coming up here. I know this is a weird thing to wonder about during Book 1, but I can't recall if the series addresses people getting burned out of the pattern with the generally cyclical nature of the wheel of time itself? I think there's a bit where Rand ponders whether or not The Dark One would basically rule / destroy the whole universe if they lose The Last Battle and comes to the conclusion that wouldn't be what happens. So does The Creator remake stuff from jump at some point? Or... if someone goes to the moon in the nest First Age, would they see the American flag and the footprint, the whole thing? Is there a finite number of people that gets smaller every time someone gets Balefired?

Also I think Vash’s attitude only makes sense if he gets to experience SOME joy along the way, otherwise what’s he fighting for?

Honestly after the first 3 episodes, I hope there are some more slice of life bits or whole episodes, especially if this is going to go more than one season.

I come around a lot on Mat as the series goes on, to the best of my memory. I knew he was a bit of a card at the start, I forgot that he was just... a moron. My memory of Perrin is that I like him in general but he's the worst victim of the series being too long and overwritten in the middle, and I recall thinking Faile is just a miserable character, so I hope I'm wrong about that

Plump plump plump plump plump

I think AR has tremendous potential to be an incredible learning tool, but there's no way that anyone involved in making it wouldn't just saturate your fovea with ads so... perhaps better that it's not quite fully baked.

Time for Chapters 1 - 20 of 1990's... The Eye of the World I haven't read this in a while, and my main impression about the first 20 chapters is that so much of this first book is Jordan remixing The Lord of the Rings. Bunch of people in a secluded town get visited by a wizard, they're pursued by black cloaked riders they ditch by a ferry crossing, there's a dude straight up named Thorin referenced in Moiraine's stories, those same stories also evoke a lot of Tolkien's elvish characters and names, there's a cursed treasure that someone poached from a shady creature, etc. Obviously this was done deliberately and it's not a knock, it's just much more overt than I'd remembered. Also I'd forgotten about the references to our world, John Glenn, Mother Teresa, Moscow, etc. Anyway aside from templating Tolkien, things start off pretty well. I wonder if new readers to this would have been looking for ASOIAF style swerve about who the protagonist would be. The show seemed to do that a bit, the book a lot less so given the POV focus on Rand early on and the hints about Rand being able to channel (which come up almost immediately after where I'm at IIRC). It's a bit weird coming from New Spring to this; Moiraine comes off differently having spent a bunch of time in her head. Obviously time has passed for her since then but Lan comes off much more subservient so far than he was in NS and I don't know that it makes a ton of sense, given where he ends up in not too long. Mat is a straight up idiot at this point, which is more annoying than I remember. There's also more discussion about the Emonds Field kids not opening up to Moiraine about their dreams and such than I had recalled, which is a nice inverse to Mat being such a fucking moron. Strangely I think the show does a better job than the book of establishing why he'd be so treasure obsessed. The ages of everyone are more compressed than I realized. I thought Nynaeve was a good bit older than the Emonds Field Three, but I think it's like... 5 years? I know she'd young for a Wisdom, but I forgot she was just straight up young? So Lan's like... 20 years older than her? And she's JUST out of her teens? Ooooooooooooooooooooooooookay. Also speaking of the show, Egwene is described in the book as, "Of a height with Nynaeve, and with the same dark coloring." I'd assumed they meant hair and eyes like most of the Two Rivers people, but it's neat that the show ran with that more literally. It's fun to come back to these characters. My memory is that Rand and Mat change the most in terms of where their personalities start compared to where they end up. Egwene, Perrin, and Nynaeve feel a lot closer to where they end up but it's possible I'm just projecting that given that I know how it ends. Also fun to see where some of the magic stuff doesn't super gel with how it ends up later. Probably have more character specific thoughts as I keep going, my main impression is that it's fun to come back to these characters and this series when I can be engaged with other activities, and Jesus Christ this book moves at a brisk pace considering I think the party has been on the road for 2 WEEKS-ish already and the whole series / the remaining books (not counting New Spring) take two YEARS.

I ate balut in Vietnam. It tastes fine, the texture is... unpleasant.

Probably Gato on an Apple IIGS or early Mac?

Oh yeah, I always get the alliterative M names mixed up in this one for some reason.

Caught Ep 3 today. It's good! The series so far is pretty different from both the manga and the original anime so if you're looking for an adaptation of either, it's not that other than very broad strokes. Vash, Knives, and Millie are around. Wolfwood and Legato have been teased I think. And we've seen some of the baddies show up, but they're all fairly different.

It's like I'm back in college with how I'm watching this one

TIL T-Mobile has 37 million customers.

Capital loves non-competes because it encourages workers to stay in their job by limiting their options, even if the juice from enforcing a non-compete is almost never worth the squeeze. Without the threat of litigation, companies might have to... treat and pay employees fairly in order to motivate them to stay.

Santos reminds me SO MUCH of a kid I went to high school with. Just a pathological liar, republican political aspirations, delusions of grandeur, making easily provable false claims all the time, etc. If that guy wasn't in prison for attempting to hire a hitman I'd say that George Santos might actually be him in disguise.

My god he's actively colonizing that plate...

I wonder about the whole "this generation is bad with computers" phenomenon, given the number of people my age (42) who cannot find anything on their work PC if it's not on their desktop and if they accidentally close one of their ten trillion Chrome tabs, they don't know how to get it back. I suspect a lot of it is sampling and confirmation bias, but... I really have no idea!

Yeah but none of this actually matters and I’d wager people are bad at guessing what’s planned vs what isn’t, and their guess is mostly based on how smoothly the plane lands and has very little to do with the route to the runway. It’s weird that people get hung up on this so much.

Even if they were working on a familiar engine / within a familiar framework, this is still a setup that seems to be, by design, as expensive and inefficient as possible. There's just no way the sprints that contractors would be working on align neatly with that cadence. I really don't understand this at all.

I can’t think of a single, sane reason that such a policy could possibly exist.

This is skull fuckingly dumb.