dog-days

Enjoyed The Owl House though by the time I got round to watching the final two episodes, I'd largely forgotten who everyone was. Would probably rank it below Avatar but above The Dragon Prince; don't think it ever hits the heights of the former, but avoids most of the slowness and sentimentality of the latter. Watched it in German which had a great voice actress for Edalyn and a terrible OOT one for Hooty. Though since it's probably aimed at the under-tens, I shouldn't complain. The tiny ones probably adore Hooty.

I'm part-way through Mandalorian S3 at the moment. No spoilers, please. It's better than I thought it would be given all the disappointment around its release. It's more 'Star Wars' to me than Andor. Not better; Andor is a better-written, better-plotted show. But having a baby green puppet creature start learning to be a junkyard sci-fi Spartan did seem to be channelling essence of Star Wars. I may have had a beer or two while watching it, so that possibly improved the experience.

Thread for talking about your favourite buildings or listing the reasons why a place needs bulldozing. Also for: complaining about modern architecture; complaining about people who complain about modern architecture and just need to learn to give brutalism a chance; complaining about arsehole companies forcing workers into open-plan offices. The UK has various architecture-related issues. We're a country full of old churches and chapels that burn money by the second to keep running but plummeting congregations; the decline is most marked in the established church which owns a majority of the religious buildings. The choice seems to be between selling them off or letting them collapse. We don't have enough houses for people to live in near their places of origin and places of work; the accommodation available simply hasn't kept pace with the growing population, and the construction that does happen often seems focused on student flats or four-bedroom detached houses that make the developers more profit. Related to that is the question of what modern housing should look like: most residential areas in the UK have traditionally been low-rise, rarely consisting of more than two storeys. The Neave Brown 2023 shortlist has some options. As for Germany, I understand that they've finally finished work on Brandenburg Airport. Not sure what people there do in their spare time now. Collect stamps, maybe. And the USA...I've no idea. Are there buildings there at all?

Octavian shows up in two Shakespeare plays, surviving both and ending up as Top Roman; Caesar just gets one and dies halfway through it. Octavian manages not just to entertain the history academics but also provides amusement to theologians as they ponder why on earth he'd declare a census that required everyone to return to their place of birth. Finally, Octavian was played by BRIAN BLESSED in I Claudius and so has automatically won. At being the bestest Roman, but also at everything else.

Difficult to pick on one predominant architect from the UK. Church architecture fiends tend to love Wren, of course. But apart from him, there's Pugin, Rennie Mackintosh, Inigo Jones, John Nash, Sir John Vanbrugh, Edwin Lutyens... Plus Wren was predominantly active in London. If you're from the provinces, he doesn't loom so large in the imagination.

Thought for a moment we were talking about Ben Jonson there and was a little baffled, though he certainly would have agreed about his pre-eminence among his kind (Shakespeare, Marlowe, Webster). I was listening to Gardeners' Question Time this morning so nominate Christopher Lloyd as another (possibly in the UK the Only Other) famous landscape gardener. I guess some blokes may have done some memorable stuff at Versailles and at the Summer Palace near Beijing, but I'm sufficiently insular as to have no idea who they were.

Think what might be workable would be requiring owners with dogs above a certain height* and weight to get a licence and maybe pay into some sort of deposit scheme. Stick in £2000. You get it back after three years with a clean record. A big, powerful dog can do horrific damage very quickly. e.g. the flock of 24 pregnant sheep near Wrexham that were killed by a couple of XL bulldogs recently. Yes, the basic problem is the stupid owners wanting status dogs. But sadly we can't have the owners put to sleep. Plus, waiting for an ideal world where the housing/social/economic/psychological problems that create these people have been removed is appealing, but it won't help the humans and animals being attacked by the Hellhounds Extra Plus now. * If the requirement were just weight-based, there'd be a thousand labradors with a biscuit problem falling over the threshold.

There were EU flags there before that. Last Night has a lot of Union Jacks, but it's also been a 'pick your favourite flag and bring it along' sort of event for ages. I remember seeing Welsh flags, Scottish flags, the Manx triskelion, German, French, Italian flags etc.

Shit, just saw this on the news now.

Snip

Could at least be interesting, surely?

I stopped watching the AGoT the TV show at around season 2 thinking that I'd rather just wait for The Winds of Winter. ... ...

Disney Marvel shows: I think I liked Ms. Marvel and Hawkeye best. Ms. Marvel for her family and the style/music. Hawkeye caught me by surprise – I wasn't expecting to like it, but it was well-paced and engaging. Wandavision was okay: certainly enjoyed the playing with TV genres. Season 1 of Only Murders in the Building is great. I watched it when I was sick and insomniac and it was perfect for that. Seasons 2 and 3 are a bit samey, but still fun and and if you liked S1 you'll probably like them as well. Star Wars: Andor and Mandalorian Season 1.

Five hundred and ten years since the Battle of Flodden Field (1513). King James IV became the last King from Britain to die in battle, which he did at the age of forty along with a large number of the Scottish nobility. It was a battle that the Scots should have won given that they outnumbered the English and were apparently well-positioned on top of a hill. Unfortunately for them, the cannons that should have devastated the English lines couldn't be manoeuvred so were next to useless, and the advance of the Scots infantry got literally bogged down in a marsh at the foot of the hill. So, total fuck-up. And a shame, since James IV was, as monarchs go, rather a good one.

Well, this thread's certainly been moving fast since the last episode! I figure that complaining about things is the closest the board can manage to excitement. :p

Yep, Filoni is the reason anyone's at all happy or excited to see Anakin back in Ahsoka. He managed to make him occasionally likeable instead of a green screen acrobat that massacres Sand People and kids while pouting; plus, showing how Palpatine groomed him and infiltrated his mind steadily.

Suspect that's at least partly due to Disney wanting to keep the post episode 9 period open while they decide what to do with it. They may be hoping that one or more of the TV series can be used as a launching pad into what comes next. Also, Clone Wars was I think largely made prior to the sequel trilogy. It kicked off in 2008, three years after 2005's Revenge of the Sith. With Rise of Skywalker appearing in 2019, that means the sequels are one or two cartoon seasons behind comparatively. I wouldn't necessarily have pinned any of the Star Wars films as the basis for a sprawling extended universe. But the originals came out the right time and the fandom around them just seemed to hit a kind of critical mass where there would always be a market for 'new' material.

I liked Maul in Rebels and sometimes in Clone Wars. But he's not really main villain material at all, at least not in the direction Filoni took him, where he's more of a supporting antagonist and a wildcard. I guess he didn't really have a personality in Phantom Menace so he could have acquired more proactive/big-picture qualities forty years on. But I wouldn't have trusted GL to write him.

Oh yes. I'm sure they'll end up back together. Possibly in the next episode or two. But in the meanwhile, this gives Sabine the chance to learn more about the bad guys, and possibly build up a more complex relationship with one or two of them.

... ... I hope you're the same age or older than me. If you're younger then this will ultimately mark the dawn of a new, degenerate age when the good things are swept aside and everyone just watches TickTock. But apart from that, I also prefer thirties/forties/fifties films to the seventies.

Enjoyed the episode. I'm listening to the German synchro so the slow delivery works well for me since it gives me more processing time. Not sure what I'd think about it if I were listening in English. Hera seemed a bit more perky, at least till part of her squadron died. Not always keen on fights, but here they seemed very well-orchestrated, showing the shifting emotions of the participants and giving a sense of high stakes and real struggle instead of an "okay, better throw in a flashy lightsabre duel with some acrobatics" yawn-fest. The decision to move Sabine into the enemy camp is promising. Could lead to some solid plot/characterisation opportunities for both sides. At a guess, Ahsoka fan-writers are cheerfully building Ahsoka/Sabine/evil blonde love triangles as I type.

Yeah. I was thinking for a while that maybe the Tories were calming down and focusing on the next election. Then I realised that no, they'd just been away on holiday.

Just remembering in the context of "he didn't help at all and was muttering nonsensical and insulting shit the whole time" how my dad, who was normally very quiet and softly-spoken, had a few sudden personality shifts for the worse during his last years with advanced Parkinson's. A couple of times it was from a medication he was given to raise his blood pressure; other times it was because he had a UTI. Once the medication was stopped/the UTI treated he went back to an approximation of his old self. Anyway, all the best. It's rough.

<snip> Probably not useful.

Because human males are the asari of the Star Wars universe?