karaddin

It always felt a little confused to me, due to it being a bit of a blend of different creator/evil figure pairs from human cultures. The dark one has strong chaos or destruction vibes to me as you'd see in order/chaos or creation/destruction deity pairs, so it really feels like it should just want to destroy everything and that would be the end of that - but it's got this "remake things in it's own image" tacked on the end. Also it's not really existing in conflict with the Creator half of the equation if I'm remembering right. The Creator set up the wheel and the pattern (just thinking of them as reality and time is close enough) and set them spinning, then noticed the dark one was tangled up amongst it as well and sealed it away so it couldn't fuck everything up, then the creator peaces out and isn't around anymore - it's just the wheel cycling through the ages doing it's own thing. At some point humanity fucks up and sticks a hole in the prison, the dark one tries to ruin everything and is eventually sealed off again and around and around the cycle of ages turns and repeats. And I mean properly sealed, the patch job Lews Therin did in the history of the cycle depicted in the story didn't do that. I won't spoil any more on that front as the circumstances of how the hole gets poked are plot relevant and I'd expect they're covered in the show - possibly in the next season. To circle back to the DO - unlike a primordial chaos or destruction entity it is actually evil rather than just being a force of nature. It always felt more... utilitarian evil rather than truly savouring it in the books, but maybe that's just my confusion in trying to merge the two aspects together. That's a lot of words to say I still have no idea what "in it's image" would look like.

In the books the Dark One wishes to

I find it really weird that you'd do this without having watched any of the rest of the season. I know with his focus on the written word he probably feels like he got enough from the scripts, but even if that was the final version of the scripts they just don't convey everything that comes across in the visual medium. I'm with Gertrude on the sword fight (and not just because it's silly, but because Rand risking everything for no reason in a fight he could win without risk is weirdly selfish) and the sky fight so probably not surprising I'm less sympathetic to those complaints lol. I saw that his final conclusions were still of support for the show but saying that they need 12 eps a season. If that's the take away that gets traction I'll be happy.

Doesn't sound enjoyable enough to be worth the investment of 90minutes of my time however, thanks for warning me off!

You might want to clarify which poster that was directed to as Tywin's post came in just before yours but I suspect you were speaking to the discussion above that. I don't think anything Tywin has said has been in support of retaliating against civilians in Gaza. I know your subsequent reply directly to Tywin implies this wasn't directed at him but still. I used to hope that Hamas were just holding that "goal" out as something to be given away in negotiating an actual peace but they're not getting any good faith assumption from me at this point. Fuck them. None of the discussion about who has power in and around Gaza extends to giving them a pass for an attack like this.

The law often doesn't align with my personal moral code, and I find it bizarre to think that an actor can only commit war crimes if they're a signatory to a treaty banning that particular action. I don't base my assessment of something on whether they'll actually be convinced and punished for it. Your interpretation of occupation and siege is similarly rigid to a very strict definition. Hypothetical numbers below for making a point, not saying these are the actual numbers: If there's technically a passage via which supplies could be brought in, but 25% of them happen to be deemed "suspect" by the group that has air domination and fire control of the passage who then use that to bomb the "suspect" supplies - would you say it's not under siege even though no one is willing to actually roll the dice because a 1 in 4 chance of being bombed is pretty risky? The real world does not align to strict definitions every time. Israel may not have a permanently stationed occupation force in Gaza but it absolutely has military control of the area and the capacity to prevent supplies coming in and infrastructure development there. ETA: And to make it clear - this does not absolve Hamas of their failure to improve the situation as the winner of the last election there, nor of the fact that they're terrorists and very much committing war crimes as well.

I always thought the same when I saw people talking up the difficulty of the dark souls games. I'd even tried Demon Souls and bounced off it hard without making any progress because of a lack of muscle memory with controllers. Then Elden Ring looked gorgeous, had a back story written by GRRM, and I decided to give it a go. Really struggled at the start and almost gave up with how bad I was and the lack of direction the game tells you, but once I got the fundamentals of combat down it was enjoyable and clear progress as I improved. I think the main difference was the discussion around the games always talked up the difficulty as suffering but for the most part it wasn't. It's rewarding. The bosses are like puzzles and you've just got to find the solution that works for you and get used to it. Ended up sinking more than 500 hours into it, playing the Demon Souls remake, Dark Souls 1 and started Bloodborne before my ps5 went out of action. I'd say Elden Ring is definitely the one to start with, the beautiful zones are much more pleasant and there's a lot of QOL/UI enhancements that aren't in the earlier games. Also to be clear - Malenia is an outlier. She's the hardest boss in the game with a move that's the most complex to dodge and very damaging to the fight if you get hit. Most of the others took a fraction of that time and even the other hard ones took a lot less than her.

You haven't played a souls game yet have you? Lol. Malenia in Elden Ring took me something like 110 attempts over 3 nights. Getting through that once broke me and now it seems normal!

Lol that's what happens if you leave as well. And yeah that's the fight that took me 3 hours.

Can't speak to the "like dishonored" part as I haven't played it, but prior to 2.0 at least there's definitely at least 2 that could be done with stealth with includes the final boss in most endings, although there's 2 which don't have that so I guess "at least 1" if you choose either of them. You are forced into combat at the start but at least with certain quick hacks (possibly without) it was possible to get out of combat and use stealth take downs - they even have unique animations for them, but it may require getting out of combat more than once as it takes more than one to finish them. I suspect it's actually easier with 2.0 as one of the relic skills makes optical camo get you out of combat. I was going to argue that it was 1.4 but that's because I forgot about 1.6 and I've been shifting the version numbers down one haha. You couldn't even change your hair and make up in the mirror in 1.3, I think that was added in 1.4 then apartments 1.5 and sleeping at your romances home in either 1.5 or 1.6. Ripperdoc full appearance change was maybe 1.6? Minigames i think had roach race in 1.5 and the other 2 only with 2.0. As far as I know cars were always there though. I completely agree with the point though, even without all this it was still a very dense game environment with a ton to do, but the post launch hate and the rough launch overrode all sense. Pointing to things that were in earlier promos for all the "important" missing features is one you'll still see people going on about, although hopefully the most common one (the police system) is finally gone. I've never even understood the fixation on that, you literally work for the cops a ton - openly fighting them regularly conflicts with the core story element of V's employment. The crimes you're committing aren't meant to be the type that ever get reported to NCPD.

"Suck it up" is really the right choice of words and it's not just this. One of the other huge barriers to peace in circumstances like this is that it requires both sides to accept that there will be people they feel (almost certainly correctly) need to face justice who will get away with their crimes. There's no real solution to that, but there's rarely a way forward if you can't accept that. I think the above comment about Israel isn't fair, nor is even arguing about a root cause a useful endeavor. What I think is fair to say is that Israel is the only party with the power to appreciably improve things. Even in the miraculous event that Hamas completely lost all support and all their members were turned over to Israel immediately, the state of affairs for regular people in Gaza isn't going to start to improve without changes from Israel. That does put a greater burden on Israel if things are to improve, and perhaps that's not fair but it's the reality of who has actual power in the area. I know this was off topic to start with but this is such a dumb comment. You are aware that Brexit did indeed happen and the UK is no longer in the EU right? Broadly speaking it was accepted that the UK had both the ability and the right to do this, and followed through with doing so. The primary bone of contention was whether it was a good idea or not, not whether it could be done.

I just wasn't sure about the boss fight. Having only done it once I have no idea what the scaling does to it and whether it's enough to offset not having many toys yet.

Yup.

What's your cyberware capacity at? I'm pretty much maxing my edgerunner over cap utilization and think I should clear some more scanners to try get that down a little before heading into the end of the game haha. Rodrigo - I understand the frustration with the limitations but it really was done to serve the characterization of the romance options. Or at least it was with Judy, Panam and Kerry - not so much with River. They're trying to make the characters feel as real as possible by having lives outside their interactions with the main character and for me at least this really contributes to that. I loved BG3 as well - just look back at my posts in those threads for how heavily I dove into that and did 3 runs back to back. The romances in that never felt even close to what the ones in Cyberpunk managed for me. I think part of that is probably the setting - they never get the moments to just exist in day to day life in the middle of that epic fantasy adventure, another part is the 1st person perspective with ridiculously good facial/eye animations that Cyberpunk has in its corner, but part of it is also that the BG3 characters are just too heavily defined by their relationship to the main character. Cyberpunk is at some of it's best with the quests that have little to do with being a merc. Pyramid Song and Boat Ride (which you haven't got to yet) are essentially just sharing a non romantic intimate moment with these characters and chilling, so far away from "gamey" things. Going on a date with Karlach feels like it's trying to take a leaf out of this book and it's good, but it's just too short to really hit the same kind of note.

My issues with the Seanchan resolution were the same as Gertrude's. And "no one but the Sul'dam cared" is not satisfying to me. The entire system is built on sincerely held fear of the power that can be wielded by those who channel, with the revelation that the Sul'dam themselves can channel this fear should be extended to them and they should be left with no one to hold the leash. Obviously you can feel differently about it, but it's not objectively wrong for us to feel this was an issue raised and not paid off. Yeah the show really reminded me just how much I hated them - it had faded a little over time but all came roaring back.

Yeah the entrance is closed until after you have the conversation at the entrance that I've been talking about. Rude Barghest jerks.

Not a timer if you're doing the quest, but if you leave the area it fails. The first chunk of PL is completely linear, after the very start you can't even leave if you want to - I don't think you can even use your phone for quite a while. This makes complete sense within the context of the story, its not a criticism - just something to keep in mind as you start it.

Yeah its not after Disasterpiece, its the very end of that quest chain. Since you can read the spoilers I can answer much easier than I can for Rodrigo haha

No argument on those ideas. Given a lot of readers already found Egwene very annoying she really could have used her conflict with Rand coming from a stance we actually agree with (or at the very least are highly sympathetic to) AND the Seanchan resolution was just the worst part of how it all wrapped up. I'm not sure how much of what I dislike there came down to Sanderson vs Jordans notes, but I know the Mat/Tuon sequel series ideas probably influence it a lot so I'm guessing the answer there is 'both'.

Perhaps not. I was interpreting the conversation along the lines of "it should have been someone else" rather than "they would have been better if he'd done x". I wasn't really caring about the commercial angle on its own but using that as the short hand for "acceptable to the broadest range of readers" but even that's a misunderstanding of the conversation on my part.

By "the right call" I meant from a commercial perspective, not an artistic one, and really should have made that clear as it's a very different claim. I think the number of people that would have been upset about things they felt were changed or wrong would have had a greater impact than the number of people that felt the books were underwhelming/unsatisfying. And I'm sure there are other authors that could have done a better job, I'm just pretty skeptical that any of those authors would have also been willing to do the job - not just because of the risk of fan backlash, but also because it means putting their own projects on hold and working under an editor that was extremely close to the material. They're flawed books written under unfortunate circumstances by an author that absolutely cared about the material and was under a lot of pressure. I'm grateful that they exist to give us the closure that we got, even though I wish Jordan got to finish them himself. Going without aMoL would be one thing, but not having gotten even TGS would have been terrible.

@IFR Of course that's reasonable, I'd even agree it's unfortunately likely to be true simply due to the nature of the television industry. Going a step further and suggesting that it's only because the writers suck and maybe a side order of virtue signaling but has nothing to do with industry trends, the expense of filming etc really doesn't come across as good faith however. The claim that they allow no critique at all is about as good faith as the previous bit, but it's definitely got a positive slant to it - and I have enjoyed a lot of the threads that I've read there, so snark aside it's a good recommendation for others.

I think one of the main points for me is that you think the writing is bad and the writers are terrible - I'm aware of it and I'm certainly not going to forget it even without reminders. It doesn't need the repetition to know that's where you stand and it doesn't really add anything more to have it reiterated. You watched season 1 and much like many people here you didn't enjoy it. That's a disappointing outcome for you and for the show runners, but it happens. As a result of that you drew the above conclusions and it really seems to me like that so heavily colored your viewing of season 2 that you watched it with it pre-judged and funnily enough found that your opinion matched the pre-judgement. There's not actually an enjoyable or useful discussion to be had when that's the fundamental basis of the critique. Obviously I'm one of the posters most positive about the show, so I don't expect my positive view of the season to be particularly convincing to you. However quite a few of the posters that had a much more positive view of season 2 (compared to season 1) still seemed to be trying to find things to dislike in the finale so I don't think the change in their reception for this season should be dismissed in the same fashion that I accept mine would be. Hell it's easy to see the difference - I still think the entire Warder plot line going back to Stepin in season 1 was well done, enjoyable and engaging in efficient set up work that will be paying off for seasons - they all still hate that in both seasons. But contrast the portrayal of Ishy and Lanfear is just excellent, I haven't seen anyone that hasn't enjoyed that who sounds like they gave this season a chance. Moving on from belabouring that point... There was plenty about the Sanderson books that didn't work for me, but I think at the end of the day they're as good as we could have gotten from an author willing to do their best at finishing another authors story in a style approximating theirs. I think Sanderson was extremely wary of addressing any major event/resolution which didn't have clear planning from Jordan left for him to follow, which left a lot of threads left dangling or given a very hasty bare bones conclusion but at the end of the day this reluctance was probably the right call and attempting to fill that in himself would have landed even worse. This probably plays into not getting some of those things fionwe really felt were missing - too significant to tackle on his own, not significant enough to have notes left. Excessive pages after pages of the last battle was safer to write even if he wasn't as good at that.

@Ran to be fair to poobah I didn't read that last post you're replying to as actually saying IFR is that, but rather that consistently using that language is going to lead some people to draw the conclusion and if that association isn't desired (and it very much sounds like it isn't) then using other language might be more productive. IFR may not be interested in following that advice of course and is entirely within rights to not do so. That just seems to have been more of an issue in past discussions than this occasion. All that said I'm certainly happy to move the conversation along, I haven't been getting involved in it either.

Soy mocha is my preferred coffee in fact, adding chocolate can only improve things!