DaveSumm

Regardless of whether it’s a good thing or not, I think it’s reached the point where not lowering immigration will just lose you an election. If Starmer can keep things broadly average in other areas, and just head into the next election with “we’re the only party to have lowered immigration since Thatcher”, that should head off any Reform threats, and probably Tory ones too.

I think that’s correct. The trilogy he’s about to write is what he originally envisaged as Era 2, but then he wrote Alloy of Law, then expanded it to its own era, so now there’s 4. There’s an interview being posted gradually across the week over at winteriscoming.net where he talks about it. It also mentions that (WaT spoilers):

Thank you. Yea it’s a hotly contested sequence that, I can see both arguments. If I’d just read WaT and saw how neatly it teed up Sunlit Man, I’d say definitely read it after. But then Sunlit is written very much as mystery, in terms of who this person is and what’s happened to them and why. So weirdly, I think both are best read first. Which isn’t possible. Sunlit Man suffers more from being second, but WaT probably takes precedence as just being such an important book in the general scheme of things. I don’t feel too strongly either way, certainly I care far less than I do about getting at least as far as Rhythm of War before reading Lost Metal.

An updated version: A Complete Spoiler Guide to the Cosmere

Or maybe make the thread a Wind and Truth spoiler thread

Again could I request spoiler tags for that doozy of a spoiler

Spoiler tags maybe? Also

Isles of the Emberdark White Sand (prose version) Mistborn Era 3: 1 Elantris 2 Mistborn Era 3: 2 Elantris 3 Mistborn Era 3: 3 Plus possibly a Horneater novella sprinkled in there.

I makes me feel embarrassment for anyone praising it. It plays out like two school children were given an assignment in drama class and hastily acted out the terrible dialogue. “Compassion, which I would define as unconditional love…” What? Lucas is just flat out bad at writing dialogue. I’ll maybe begrudgingly say I can detect some efforts from Christensen to actually act, but it’s painful to watch how it clashes with the dialogue. “You’re exactly how I remember you in my dreams” (leaving aside that, once again, this doesn’t really make sense, he’s basically praising himself for accurately remembering her from that time they… you know, met), is the sort of dialogue you could only deliver holding a stereo up in the girls front garden. But they’re both just casually eating, and neither of them ever respond properly to the tone of what’s being said. Lucas so resoundingly fails to direct this scene, the shots themselves are just basic left and rights of the actors, and it seems very obvious to me that he’s said nothing to the actors in terms of tone or how they’re supposed to play it. They’ve been stranded, so they just start reading the script and hope for the best.

I feel like the prequels deserve their own branch of sociology, it’s genuinely fascinating. Has any other piece of media ever attracted such staggering amounts of projection? This entire ornate scaffolding that people have constructed around the most vacuous set of films I’ve ever seen… I mean “Padme doesn’t lecture or condemn him”, you’re literally adding your own motive to a scene where Natalie Portman stands there and DOES NOTHING, because Lucas failed to direct her to do anything. They are terrible, terrible films, and Attack of the Clones is comfortably the shittest one.

*DaveSumm proudly steps forth to receive his medal from Princess Leia*

I’ve half typed a few responses, but I keep getting Admiral Ackbar’s voice in my head; “It’s a trap!”

Felt exactly the same, when he’s stealing and they’re doing the voiceover parts for each of the items he’s stealing, it feels like there’s a great show there with an identity. But it happens for 5 minutes an episode, and then it goes back to being a soap about rich people. That said, it’s still Jon Hamm so I’m still pretty entertained. Just wish someone took this idea and went in with both feet, someone rich crashing out of their wealth and realising their friends are all the fucking worst.

I’d say it was broadly better, but not in every episode for me (the pre-amble episode to Day’s walking the Spiral for instance), but given what they had to work with on Terminus, I still really liked it. The general mystery of the floating thing that was there when they arrived, the attack, the old ship… it was usually bettered by the Empire story (really enjoyed faulty-Dawn) but not to the extent that I was annoyed when we went back to Terminus. Only minor quibble overall is the distinction between psycho-history and whatever Salvo is. From a narrative point of view, it seems odd to have one system that definitely isn’t magic, it just happens to be able to predict the future of large scale empires (except Hari seems remarkably good at predicting smaller scale events across the whole season), and another that also predicts the future … and is basically magic. Maybe it’ll get explained more, but it seems redundant to go to all the trouble of explaining how it’s a branch of mathematics, but also some people can just see the future.

I made a huge error with this show, and read all the negativity during season 1 on this thread and skipped it. The other night I had nothing to watch, so figured I’d give it a shot. Honestly I have no idea what everyone’s problem is, OK it’s a little unusually paced due the crazy amount of decade skipping that kinda has to happen. And maybe the lead actress on Terminus isn’t rocking anyone’s world, but damn, it’s the most epic sci-fi I’ve seen, film or TV. I think it’s really good, and this is based entirely on Season 1. Can’t wait to start season 2.

I’ve seen up to episode 5. I’ll be honest, I feel like this would be amazing if I understood what the fuck was going on. I know it’s quite common for ‘low brow shows’ to generally spoon feed and explain everything, and for ‘high brow shows’ to do the opposite and trust the audience (especially post The Wire). But can you go too far? Can there be such a thing as too slow a build up across the sets of episodes? I don’t remember feeling that for Season 1 to this degree, I still broadly understood the situation then and was willing to be patient with it. I dunno, maybe I’m being thick. Some kid went to Saw Gerrera with a thing, had to stay, got roped into doing a complicated something, then huffed some gas? The music’s telling me this is super significant, but it’s gone straight over my head. I’m fully confident I’ll rewatch it one day and realise it’s incredible, but it’s a struggle at the moment.

I’ve seen this raised a few times, and I’m never convinced by the argument.

Wind and Truth spoilers

Finally finished. God it’s exhausting … and that’s not a dig at the book, I think just immersing yourself in a book of any quality that’s 1325 pages long just takes it out of you. I feel like I need a break from reading anything other than comics right now. I’ll post more thoughts tomorrow but just wanted to point out @Werthead, I think you’ve misunderstood the chronology here and a few other posts. What Sanderson was doing here was emphasising that all of this is set before Era 2, not after. Things are left where they need to be for the whole of that sequence of 4 books to happen, and I was actually really glad he did it that way. It leaves open the option to read all of Stormlight, then read all of Era 2 without spoilers (well, as long as you read Secret History I guess). There was no teeing up of Era 3 that I could detect (other than, loosely, the general state of all the Shards that may or may not play into it). Edit: by the way, Die Hard with a Sprengeance? *chefs kiss*

Pretty good movie, and surprisingly isolated and low key for a team-up.

Last time I watched Black Widow, I put it chronologically right after Civil War in a rewatch of the Infinity Saga, and it works so much better. Kinda the same as you, I enjoyed the family aspect, but good lord did they flub Taskmaster. There was like 2 scenes where maybe, if you squint a bit, it kinda looked like someone else’s fighting style. That was it, other than that it was just a Widow in a fancy suit. Not that I’ve seen Thunderbolts yet, but I can’t imagine Hawkeye is all that essential. Yelena just shows up to tie off the post credit scene of Black Widow, but doesn’t do anything really transformative. FatWS could be more worth it just for John Walker, as his arc in that is a little less straight forward (he’s a good guy but then fucks up, but not in a way that makes him totally evil).

Feels like a good batch, they mostly seem like they want to actually win each task (possible exception of Fatiha, who occasionally veered toward the Jo Brand schtick of not caring).

If anyone fancies testing their DS9 knowledge, it was someone’s specialist subject on MasterMind recently: Nothing like a subject you know about to make you realise the questions are actually quite poor, sadly. How on Earth are “what was Odo’s blood type that one time he had actual blood which was mentioned once” and “who played Liquidator Brunt” equivalently difficult questions? I remember finding the aSoIaF ones quite disappointing as well.

I’d say I’ve found them all very funny, but this recent episode was probably the most straight forward comedy episode, compared to the earlier ones that flexed a bit more. We’ll see if the trend continues I guess, but I do enjoy that they’ve all seemed to shoot for a different style.