Kal-El814

It's really well done!

These people are so fucking stupid.

Not with that attitude.

Maybe if Quiznos had their employees sign non-competes, Subway couldn’t have poached their trade secret… an oven.

No.

Kinda curious about people who watched Mando but not Book of Boba Fest and if they're confused about Grogu just being around.

Oh shit, I hope the pup is okay. Our older beagle got into some dark chocolate years ago, a couple bars we had tucked away for baking. We had to make her puke it up after talking to animal poison control; smeared some peanut butter in her bowl and topped it with hydrogen peroxide. She drank that to get to the peanut butter and a few minutes later it was like that scene from the exorcist, but she ended up being okay.

He was always a bad fit for Trek. He could have made a good version of something like First Contact, I think? Well established characters, more of a straightforward conflict as opposed to a moral dilemma, etc. But putting him at the helm for a franchise reboot? That was just never going to work.

I need some Gatorade

TFA is... fine. Abrams leans too hard on homage and the movie works best when everyone's running and doesn't leave the audience a lot of time to think, but... it's fine. It's not great but I think it generally succeeds at what it's trying to do. Yes, it's got misses like Leia and Chewie not bonding after Han's death. And I'll never understood why he cast the world's most beautiful woman and then made her play Maz. But it's still fun. RoS is all of his bad instincts on a cocaine binge. I don't know how much of that is actually his fault; the movie clearly could have used more time in the oven and in hindsight Disney's insistence on hitting a specific date made everything worse. But it's one of the few Abrams vehicles that doesn't work even when everyone's running and going pew pew pew. And while I love TLJ and appreciate that it some people disliked parts of it (ignoring the chud response, naturally), I don't know that I've seen any movie so actively afraid of its predecessor. It's bad, it's cowardly, it's uncreative, it's nonsense. As far as nepo babies go, you could do a lot worse than Abrams.

He's good at evoking in the moment feels and his vibes are usually on point.

YIKES

This was my experience with so much of Read Dead 2.

Since I've read almost all of these books before, I thought I'd start chronologically and kick things off with... 2004's New Spring I say "almost all of these books" because I was shocked to find out that... I don't think I've read this? Maybe it was just the graphic novel or maybe just a summary? Pretty early on I realized I hadn't actually read this and my plans to "live blog" this blew up. So I'm already cheating and I've finished New Spring before starting this thread; I couldn't listen to a new book and split my attention to painting like I will for the books I knew I read. So the following are my impressions of the whole book. I don't think this book is particularly necessary in the grand scheme of WoT overall. I was mainly struck by the plot pacing being kind of bad. I know this is a Robert Jordan WoT book so that's certainly on brand. Still, it's a bit weird that for a book where the main point seems to be to give more context to Moiraine, Siuan, and Lan... it doesn't REALLY do that. Lan and Siuan in particular are basically fully baked and just waiting on a cooling rack for the real show to start. Moiraine is a little better off than them but given what I recall of her drive to find The Dragon Reborn by TEoTW... it would have been nice to have the novel not end where it did. One of the things that struck me from not having engaged with the series much since reading AMoL is just how much NS focuses on Moiraine's thoughts about who has too much bosom, there must be close to a half dozen references to where arms were folded in relationship to someone's breasts, etc. The male gaze in the prose is pretty strong. I've read and listened to a good amount of feminist theory in the last ten years so it's not surprising that these things jump out at me. I suspect things like that and WoTs insistence on a rigid gender binary are going to be somewhat frustrating through this re-read. Jordan's take on "pillow friends" has always felt too cute by half and it would have been interesting to get more insight into Moiraine's and Siuan's relationship in that respect, but it's just as glossed over here as it was in the main series, which is kind of a shame on a couple levels. The final confrontation in this book was also abrupt and I thought... bad. I believe one of the criticisms Jordan received through the run of WoT was that a lot of characters had plot armor, so the prequel probably gave him some flexibility to let one of the Black Ajah go HAM, but... then Merean just gets stabbed in the back? Despite the book clearly stating that no woman who could channel could sneak up on another women who could? And Lan mentioning that Ryne was a better swordsman feels like a pretty transparent glow up just to lend drama to his fight. The same applies to Moiraine bonding Lan. The whole book leading up to the way that happened again felt like a bit of a missed opportunity. Thankfully this book doesn't commit the main sin that the middle of WoT does from my memory... it's not too fucking long. So on a 1 - 5 scale (1: poor, 2: fair, 3: good, 4: very good, 5: excellent), I'd probably give New Spring a 2. More time spent with Moiraine is always worthwhile, though I wish we'd gotten more insight into Lan as opposed to just more of him. And Siuan is always a winner. Without the "missing" prequels it's hard to say it's necessary and since the whole WoT affair is already close to 4.5 million words... it's not really a meaningful addition to the series.

So I've discovered that one of the things that I like to do while I'm painting minis, working on general tabletop game projects, or playing solo tabletop games is to listen to audiobooks I've already heard / read. I find those kinds of tasks require enough focus for me to not pay super close attention to what I'm listening to, so knowing the broad strokes of stuff allows me to mentally zoom in and out of focusing on what I'm listening to and what I'm painting / sculpting / basing. Since I find that painting generally make time melt away, what better thing to listen to than one of the longest series out there... The Wheel of Time. This is basically going to be a blog and I suspect little to no engagement but hey, whatever! It'll be fun for me as long as I stick with it. If people who know the series wanna chime in, I'm all for that, or if people wanna rubberneck this borderline flagellant activity... the more the merrier. I'm not going to bother spoiler tagging anything, the series wrapped up a decade ago and it's clear enough to me that the show is going to shake things up enough that I don't think I'm really going to spoil that, either.

Aaaaaaaand they protected their account.

WotC blows plenty of ass on its own.

It's so fucking demented. Why shouldn't someone else have shot THIS guy with the assumption that he was going to rob the robber? The most charitable interpretation of these events relies upon trusting the intent of a stranger who just shot someone over the contents of a cash register. It's batshit.

There's a thread on the forbidden site by account Holitabun with a bunch of screencaps of Roiland being a fucking creep with her when she was 16, asking if she'll be a cam girl when she's old enough, calling her / lamenting that she's jailbait. You know, super normal, awesome stuff.

Motherfucker should be in jail.

What a cutie.

He also listens to Holst, I am sure.

I remember thinking that a good portion of the manga was unintelligible, but it's been ages since I've read it; probably the first time it was published in the US.