Ran
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Posts posted by Ran
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I don't know why all the invective about this. It's 100% accurate reporting when confirmed by multiple sites.
And it's not a surprise at all. The sale of HBO to Discovery+ has led to a wave of very hard-eyed, financially-driven decisions -- shows abruptly getting cancelled, reports of the new bosses wanting both to trim the fat and develop things that have high potential to be popular. A spin-off post-GoT sequel wasn't in the works last year, and the only real change is the ownership.
So, yeah. Still, early development, who knows where it goes. But Discovery+ is going to try and discover as many ways to produce money-making content as possible, and I'd also guess George's influence on the proceedings are increasingly limited to what is contractually obligated when compared to the first season of GoT.
Hibberd was right to point to Disney's success (with viewership, if not necessarily critically) with its character-focused spin-offs to the MCU and Star Wars. This is pretty obviously someone deciding that there's no reason that the cast and characters of the most popular show HBO ever made need to sit on the sidelines when the franchise is expanding.
Finally, who knows, it might be good just as a show? Depends on the showrunners and writers and all. It'll be the purest possible licensed fiction and I'm not personally interested in it, but there's clearly an audience out there for it if you look around at the response online. Kit and Jon Show have their fans.
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An update for those interested on the worldbuilding side of things, Mark Smylie has been progressing along several fronts. Today he released a second section of the Geographiae Mundi. The first was awhile ago, about the University of Therapoli, and this one is about the Great Guild of Therapoli (basically the organized underworld). Lots of character profiles of notable figures as well as maps of zones of influence, depictions of buildings, illustrations of typical scenes, etc. This is on top of a few new maps he released, including a climate map for the Known World, as well as a multi-page document on heraldry in the Middle Kingdoms covering Daradjan clan emblems and heraldry variations between the various kingdoms. He invented a whole new system for marking one's victories in the Great Tournaments of the setting, too, which is pretty neat.
I'm amazed at how fertile and thorough his approach to worldbuilding is.
(Also, Patreon members can now join a Discord channel where there's a running Q&A).
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2 hours ago, Spockydog said:
Just because we didn't see the micro-gravity playrooms towards the centre of the structure, doesn't mean they don't exist.
I'm sure they do, but the whole point is that it'd be a lot easier for it to be at lower gravity -- easier to maintain, safer for the superstructure, and surely more interesting to the tourists.
No nausea from being at some amount of G, so why go all the way to 1G? Especially as space tourism implies that no one is staying there permanently.
In fact, were I Polaris, I'd have set the main area to .38G -- aka Mars -- and propose NASA pay to have astronauts go to the station to train for the Mars expedition at Mars-like gravity before then ferrying over to the Moon for additional training.
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2 hours ago, Werthead said:
I think it's a commentary on the private sector getting involved, which immediately leads to cut corners, cost-savings, people being underpaid, ignoring health and safety laws if they think they can get away with it and being reluctant to admit anything to government or regulators (like nobody at any time thinking to ask NASA for help or advice).
If the next episode brings that up, maybe. But within the episode itself, no one raises a question about it, which struck me as odd.
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The opening history sequence was fun, but god damn it, why did Kirk Gibson still have to hit his homerun in 1988? Why can't the A's catch a break?!
SpoilerThe physics of the episode was pretty wonky, though after last season that's no surprise.
I'm dubious Danny could have climbed a ladder at 3G, for one thing, but can just about suspend disbelief for it especially as it would get easier as he climbed. But his hanging for an extended time by one hand from the station -- where gravity would have been even higher! -- and doing useful work while doing it? No. Bloody. Way. The world record one-arm dead hang is a little over 2 minutes at body weight. People doubling their weight with vests and weights are measured in seconds, not minutes. Triple the weight? Forget about it.
Similarly, the result of his being temporarily knocked out ... should not have been his peacefully hanging from the end of his tether. His momentum would have led him to swinging and hitting the side of the station as the station slowed relative to his speed, and then he probably would have oscilitated back and forth for awhile before reaching equilibrium some time after the station returned to 1G.
Also, finally, why was the station's main area at 1G? Surely the whole point of space would have been to give people the experience of lower-than-1G gravity. I'd have had the main region at like .5G. Have fun playing basketball when you can dunk better than Trailblazers star Michael Jordan!
(Actually, the real last remark was about how utterly stupid the station's design must be that there's a single stuck valve causing all this trouble -- where's the redundancies? Why isn't there an option to evacuate or remove the fuel to starve it? Or additional valves? Hmm...)
Normally not the sort of stuff that I nitpick, but the shift of the show from pretty grounded in S1 to this tomfoolery -- unnecessary tomfoolery, if they just dialed back how many Gs they were pulling -- is hard not to notice.
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9 hours ago, KalVsWade said:
His wife actually gets to, ya know, do something, have some agency, make some choices.
To each their own. For me, the character and her choices were all telegraphed and went exactly where you would expect, and her story was mediocre and one of the least engaging parts of season 3. This season, four episodes in, she feels like she barely existed at all or died years earlier, which says something about the impact of the character.
I was about to say that if you had the actress in a lineup of other women, I'm not even sure I'd pick her out as Becca... but Google reminds me that she's also Karen Baldwin on For All Mankind, so I'd recognize her from that, I guess? She of the storyline that shall not be named!
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5 hours ago, IFR said:
Season 2 was weaker for me, but I'm very much enjoying this season.
Homelander is a wonderful character that really elevates this show. I tried reading the graphic novels and found them to be poorly done, so credit goes to the writers for creating an engaging story from that mess.
Ennis's particular voice is an acquired taste. There are aspects of the Ennis comic that I prefer to the TV show, myself, but that said I think the show is better than it has any right to be and that's in large part to do with the writers handling changes pretty well. Though I'm not a fan of the Ryan storyline (which is notably very different to what actually happened with Homelander's rape-begotten son...)
4 hours ago, Rhom said:Infinity War snap… but done in The Boys style.
More like Alan Moore style in Miracleman #15 when Kid Miracleman does... well, this to London (warning: a gruesome, ghastly bit of art from John Totleben).
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I first remember seeing him in Hard Eight, though of course he'd already worked for years in Hollywood (including Midnight Run). But PTA's directorial debut seemed to be the start of something of a Renaissance for Hall. Lots of small roles, sure, but in memorable films: The Rock, Air Force One, Boogie Nights, Rush Hour, The Insider, Magnolia, The Talented Mr. Ripley...
Here's a scene where he's largely silent, but there's a gravity and weight to just his eyes that's remarkable.. especially when contrasted with the bravado and energy of the late, great Phillip Seymour Hoffman on the opposite side of the craps table:
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I think a page for a game -- including BoD -- would be fine, and if people want to list some of the details or notable characters from those games on that page, that would make sense. Same with like the various RPGs and sourcebooks. But things get very muddied if you end up having a bunch of characters who are purely game inventions showing up in searches right next to actual canon characters.
So the SIFRP category should go, IMO, and if people want to briefly note some of the characters from the game's modules/adventures on that page, they could do that.
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Agreed, MUSH character stuff needs to go. We are not going to confirm which characters or events are from GRRM in general. The wiki is for fully canon material, i.e. written, co-written, or otherwise directly overseen by George where he confirms that he has overseen things. He did not give approvals for individual props (like that lineage book from GoT) and we know explicitly he did not have any direct involvement in the Telltale game.
@Vaith Please remove the entries, or help others do it, when you've a chance.
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Love his anecdote about Dunnett.
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12 minutes ago, Leofric said:
A beautiful moment ruined by your need to see if GGK dotted his i's and crossed his t's
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Guilty as charged! I suspect this book may work better on a second read now that I got that out of my system. Although even better would probably be a re-read of A Brightness Long Ago and then going straight into this one...
ETA:
Although, actually, there was another factor as to why that didn't quite work for me:
SpoilerThat quick check for the details reminded me that Carlo was a serial killer who killed innocent Assharites out of a misguided quest for vengeance for his sister. Hard to feel super choked-up for him!
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6 minutes ago, Leofric said:
which had me a bit choked up, but in a good way.
SpoilerThat one certainly worked very well! But the effect was marred for me, a little bit, by that whole intertextual thing that led me to digging back into A Brightness Long Ago to see if Carlo having a sister who had been taken by the Assharites was mentioned (it in fact was).
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52 minutes ago, Jaxom 1974 said:
I loved All the Seas of the World...thought it had some upside and downs. I don't know that I rate it about A Brightness Long Ago, but it's absolutely stronger than Children of Earth and Sky...
Glad you enjoyed it! What aspects do you prefer to Children of Earth and Sky? Admitting, as I have previously, that there's a a real structural problem with that book regarding the portion in Asharias, it does have some things that I felt this book didn't have. For example, one of the major things I love with Kay is how he writes... well, heroic sacrifice. It's a thing he writes very well. But there wasn't, really, any in AtSotW. Of course, good that he looks at different things, but... this was the first novel in a bit from GGK that didn't quite find a way to bring me to tears.
It's interesting how Kay handles Gurcu, both here and in Children of Earth and Sky. He definitely depicts him as very shrewd, and I agree that his handling of affairs in this book made sense.
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Ursula Vernon's comics work is excellent, from what I recall of it. And she's just a really nice person, from my experience (she also had a terrific acceptance speech at the Helsinki Worldcon in 2017). Not shocking that Digger went out of print, but nice that Rothfuss is trying to bring more attention to it as he gets it back in print.
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Iron Eagle was written in the summer of 1984 and went into pre-production shortly after, and principal photography began in early May of 1985, whereas Top Gun wasn't even announced until the end of 1984 (when it was titled Top Guns) and principal photography began in late June 1985. Which is part of the reason why Iron Eagle came out first.
The film has commonly been said to be a clone or rip-off, but it feels like it's just one of those zeitgeisty things -- neither film influenced the other, it was just "that time" for patriotic military airforce films. (The F-16s flown in Iron Eagle were American-made, of course, but were actually rented from the Israeli Air Force.)
I have seen Iron Eagle 2, but the first Iron Eagle is much superior because of the teenage misfits side of things adding a (exaggerated) glimpse into military base life for military brats (which, being one at the time the film was made, made it especially appealing to me). [I say exaggerated because no, we did not have handy abandoned bunkers to commandeer for our clubs... we just broke into empty base housing and hung out in them :P]
And despite its obviously-lower budget and craft, if Louis Gosset Jr. had had Tom Skerrit's role in Top Gun, I wouldn't have complained, he had fantastic presence as Chappy and Chappy was a great character. -
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3 hours ago, Reny of Storms End said:Spoiler
Yeah, that's a great one. I love Kay's depiction of Lancelot, Arthur, and Guinevere. I know he'll never revisit Arthuriana again, he's said he got it out of his system, so to speak, with Fionavar, but I'd pay for a genuine Arthurian novel from him.
- JGP, Prince of the North, Calibandar and 1 other
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22 minutes ago, Calibandar said:
I definitely remember Fionavar having some real standout moments. Which one are you thinking of?
SpoilerThe specific line Linda was trying to recall involved Imraith-Nimphais and Tabor, and it's actually Imraith-Nimphais's first words to Tabor, " We will have only each other at the last." Which Kay repeats several times in The Darkest Road, as they fight in the last battle, and just before Imraith-Nimphais and Tabor launch themselves at the dragon.
For me, there's way too many, but the entire passage from Uthach's challenge and Guinevere's attempt to deny fate by calling on Lancelot to Diarmuid doing the impossible -- "For the honor of the Black Boar!" indeed -- and on to Diarmuid's death are... I'm just glad I have it on Kindle now, the pages of the book would have been destroyed with tears if we had to turn to the physical thing for re-reads.
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3 hours ago, Jaxom 1974 said:
I actually haven't read the third book
Looking at the Kay AMA for All the Seas of the World, he was asked about lines from his books that particularly resonated with him still, which got us to thinking. Linda remembered a line from Fionavar, but she wasn't sure if it was from the character's introduction or from their final scene, so I went and checked The Darkest Road... and almost instantly, just skimming a page, my eyes started watering because of all the remembered feelings that brief encounter with the book had. It is laden almost to the point of emotional torture with genuine pathos.
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1 hour ago, Ormond said:
Though Ysabel has a 15 year old main character and would certainly be "appropriate" for young adults, even it doesn't seem to be marketed as a YA book in the USA. There is no "reading age" designated for it on Amazon like there is for books marketed as YA like Sabaa Tahir's An Ember in the Ashes, and at BooksAMillion it actually says Ysabel's "reading level" is "18-up".
Interesting. I distinctly recall early marketing and buzz around it as YA, but perhsps in the decade since the publishers have recalibrated. Or maybe I’m misrecalling.
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His only YA book is Ysabel.
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2 hours ago, Jaxom 1974 said:
When recommending Kay to someone for the first time, do you start with Lions or one of the other stories...?
For my part, yes, The Lions of Al-Rassan. But Kay himself says he tries to learn a bit more about what people are interested in before recommending, and that makes sense now that his settings are increasingly diverse. Fan of Vikings or The Northman? Try The Last Light of the Sun. Enjoy Chinese wuxia films? Try Under Heaven. Want more magic? Tigana.
But that said, Lions and maybe Under Heaven are the two standalones that perhaps provide the most concise sampling of Kay's writing style and themes.
HBO Planning Dunk and Egg, Other Thrones-properties
in Game of Thrones News
Posted · Edited by Ran
No. Because it's licensed fiction and I don't expect George will be involved at all in it. It'll be the GoT-universe.
He was not "totally wrong". There was a prequel that touched on Robert's Rebellion -- what he didn't know was that it was the Tourney at Harrenhal Broadway show, not something for HBO.