dog-days

Caught the latest episode. It was pretty slow. Still, I enjoyed Ray Stevenson just hanging around having presence, Ahsoka training with the holo-recording of Anakin, and the battle at the end. Even liked the small tortoise creatures. I was probably around six or seven when I watched Return of the Jedi for the first time and so was brainwashed into appreciating small, chirpy, highly merchandisable Star Wars aliens. 

I'd forgotten how much I liked Ezra in Rebels; his efforts to make sure his turtle friends stayed out of harm's way brought it back. (Though if this really was the OT, they would have defeated Thrawn and his army with their slingshots and bumper cars). 

During the many bits when I was bored, I thought about annoying plot twists. 

1. The whole planet is an illusion generated by an unknown power in the still-mysterious other galaxy. Only Baylan Skoll may have an idea of what's really going on. 

2. Ezra is a Force Ghost. The powers of the Witches of Dathomir/song of dying star whales/some plot MacGuffin etc. make him more solid than the kind we're used to. He disappears as Ahsoka's ship leaves the atmosphere. 

3. All of Filoni's Star Wars TV shows have been working towards a single ultimate end: a Doctor Who crossover movie. The last two episodes on Peridea, which does look rather like an abandoned Welsh quarry, have been the strongest signals yet. Huyang may be the Doctor's latest 'John Smith'. 

13 hours ago, Zorral said:

@dog-days -- Finished the last chapters of Osman's Last Devil To Die last night.

I predict you will like it.  For many reasons, not least because you will be kept in a state of admiring the author's ability to keep throwing the curve balls, that are not expected.  Even the biggest curve ball, which we expect, turns out to be something more than that, and unexpected.

A great way to go out, which I am guessing The Thursday Murder Club now, wisely, has done .

Super. I'm glad it ended on a strong note. In that case I'll pick it up from the library when I can. 

12 hours ago, felice said:

Lots of people have saved Ahsoka's life at various times over the years. She'd obviously appreciate what Ezra did for her, but he's only an acquaintance for her, while Sabine lived with him for years. It makes perfect sense that she'd be the one most keen to rescue him.

Thanks -- been boggling a bit that this has needed spelling out. It seemed so obvious to me. 

4 minutes ago, Fragile Bird said:

I didn’t know that was going on. Since I went through it two years ago, I have a great deal of sympathy for her. Sounds like it’s going well, though, thankfully.

Yes. Early on she said something like 'everything was finally going well and I was happy, so of course this...' I'm v. glad it sounds as if she'll be able to get back to gardening and non-chemo life soon. 

Birmingham Council votes to tear down the Ringway Centre

Well I guess it's a significant part of Birmingham's reinforced concrete history and we should all try to appreciate brutalism more as a distinct product of its era and I can't pretend anymore PULL IT DOWN AND LET ME YODEL IN THE RUINS. 

Seriously, the proposal for more homes and better support for pedestrians sounds promising. (Though so many city planning announcements do at the start...) 

I still can't get over the grey dead expanse created outside of Cardiff Central Station. 

T Kingfisher/Ursula Vernon's web comic continues. Smiting Cancer with Rooster the Paladin

Until they announced the culprit, I thought it might be my mother. She hates sycamores. (They're the rabbits of the hardwood tree world – one of them growing near your back garden will rapidly create hundreds more). Part of my summer holiday was spent lopping branches off one mature specimen. 

tldr/ Plant a crabapple tree instead. 

3 minutes ago, Derfel Cadarn said:

Mogg being knighted. Nissed opportunity; Princess Anne could have won huge popularity for theroyal family if her hand had just slipped a little

 

Plus the thousands of people watching the ceremony online would all be prepared to swear on their souls that they saw Mogg trip and fall with fatal consequences sideways onto the drawn sword. Don't think he's a very popular man. 

I mostly remember my parents complaining that he was miscast as Alan Breck Stewart (Kidnapped), but it's always sad when one of those actors dies who seems to have been around forever in everything. 

3 minutes ago, Werthead said:

I don't think PoE1 was very good. Combat was poor, the story never really took off for me. It was good as a statement of intent, but the execution was so-so.

What I would do is put the outstanding Tyranny on there. And definitely drop Mass Effect 2, that's redundant (and ME2, whilst a good game taken purely on its own merits, also massively derails the entire trilogy, causing a shit-ton of problems that ME3 failed to address). I also wish they'd combined BG1 and BG2 in an effective Legendary Edition as one game, allowing you to go from BG1 to Siege of Dragonspear (optionally) to BG2 to Throne of Bhaal in one seamless experience. That would allow us to get them both on the same list (as BG2 is better, but BG1 arguably has the more iconic opening, shades of the relationship between A New Hope and Empire).

Tyranny for me was just dull grim-dark stuff to slit your wrists by. I'll give you that was slightly less boring than Witcher 3. 

The plot of PoE was stronger than PoE2 and was interwoven with the setting in really powerful ways. Plus it had a good villain – better than BG2's in terms of characterisation if not voice acting and design. 

Combat was fine – it felt like typical lowish level IE combat to me, complete with the 'oh no, I am being beaten up by a small wolf' experience. 

BG1 had a wide-openness that BG2 didn't. It was verging on open world. And normally I'm not a fan of open world games, but BG1's open meadows with random weird quests were pretty engaging. 

3 hours ago, Darryk said:

It's a pretty good list. Baldur's Gate 1 and Fallout 2 would be higher for me (I preferred Fallout 2 to Fallout 1).

The Quest for Glory games are a personal favourite of mine but probably way too old and obscure to make the list.

I'd also put Baldur's Gate 1 higher. 

Also, Pillars of Eternity 2 should be higher and Pillars of Eternity 1 should be:

a) on the list and

b) higher

Okay, they were conceived partly as tributes to the classic IE games, but they did their own thing -- and did it very well -- in terms of plot, characters and setting. 

Also, I'm now playing the Witcher 3 expansion Blood and Wine having finished the main quest and Hearts of Stone. It should be nowhere near number 2. I'm not even sure I'd put it on the list. 

Are there not loads of apps these days to help with learning Kanji?  

For a few months twelve-ish years ago I was given lessons in Hanzi while in China -- the lessons consisted of me copying out the characters with the correct stroke order again and again. I can't do any of that now, except maybe 'one' and 'person'. Also had to look up Chinese characters in a dictionary by radical. At a push, I could probably still recognise the characters for 'soup' and 'tofu' from my time spent looking for them on restaurant menus. There must be better ways by now. 

Article on Ukrainian sappers

ETA: posted too early, meant that to go in Ukraine thread. 

One of my conflicts vis a vis architecture is my default reaction is: "Wouldn't it be better if it wasn't there?" Walking through the city streets, I try and imagine what the landscape might once have looked like before we dumped a load of bricks, tarmac and concrete on it. 

For which reason, among others, I have a soft spot for Icelandic turf houses and for the probably fictional palace of Odysseus on Ithaca, incorporating a living olive tree. As a rough equivalent, in recent times, architects have experimented with green walls. I saw an example in Manchester that looked okay, if not quite Instagram-ready. The UK climate makes a lot of the more strikingly plant-heavy buildings that thrive in places like Singapore into more of a challenge. UK roof gardens often end up as cold, bleak places with lichen accounting for the majority of the plant life. 

It's something that I hope can be figured out since greenery is the only thing that can make modern dense city centres tolerable. Without it, we're ants at the feet of concrete giants. With it, we're still ants but could be slightly happier ones. 

Recently I read a great article about Kerala's use of the Miyawaki method for urban afforestation; it was taking a critical view, pointing out that the small dense areas of forest produced by the method are not typical of native ecology. Sadly, I failed to bookmark it, and it's now lost to both Google and my memory. 

I did some Latin at university. Think the difficulty varies hugely depending on the era, text and author.  Classical authors tended to be more difficult than later authors and within that period, Silver Age writers were harder than Golden Age ones, so Tacitus is more difficult than Cicero and Lucan much much more difficult than Ovid. 

OTOH, I once tried to read a poem by John Donne showing off his Latin and found that pretty impenetrable too. That's Donne for you though. 

The medieval prose I've seen has been comparatively straightforward. 

Anyway, these days I'm learning Welsh. I'm planning on sitting the advanced exam next June. (It's not really that advanced; just B2 level on the CEFR, but I'm aiming for distinction.) 

Intellectually, I get that some people find studying small/dead languages to be a waste of time. But I don't think I'll ever grasp it emotionally since to me language is about so much more than utility. I'm not someone with much visual sensitivity. I'll go to an art gallery if someone else wants to go and try and make unstupid remarks about the paintings/sculptures etc while thinking that my feet hurt and wondering if there's a cafe.

As far as I can tell, the impact that other people feel from art is something like what I feel from language. "What's the point of Scottish Gaelic/Welsh/Basque*?" isn't a question I can't answer except with another question: "What's the point of the Mona Lisa?" 

*Not just a rare language, but a pre-Indo-european one, the only living example in western Europe. 

6 minutes ago, Zorral said:

Brought home yesterday, in the pouring rain, the latest Thursday Murder Club, The Last Devil to Die.  While reading the one previous it felt to me the series had likely hit its sell-by date.  Several Brit readers have said this is definitely the case after reading The Last Devil to Die.  Time to move on, they say.  I haven't started it yet, but might tonight, if it continues to rain like it has all yesterday and so far today.

Yes, finishing book three today had a fair bit to do with the lousy weather. I think Osman needs to resolve the Stephen plot in some sense before closing the series. Not that he's a plot, exactly, but he feels like a Chekhov's something. There should be a book based around an element from his past, and one that I guess that lets him die peacefully at the end. 

Next up is going to be a Lindsey Davis Desperate Undertaking. 

Read The Bullet that Missed, the third instalment of Richard Osman's cosy crime series The Thursday Murder Club. Liked it -- it was sometimes touching and funny -- though bits of the plot didn't seem to hang together all that well and in general it needed more focus. I've been reading it in small amounts over a couple of weeks, so wasn't gripped by it, but never so bored that I thought of giving up. 

51 minutes ago, polishgenius said:

 

That really is a big boost to the budget showing there. 

Yeah. Generally I'd be happy, though I remember that when the final series of Torchwood passed go and collected $2 million, it was less good than the preceding more sparsely funded Torchwood: Children of Earth, as if the writers' room was filled with dreams of helicopter chases and fewer script notes. But RT Davies knows what he's doing. 

Well, he does sometimes. 

Saw the latest Ahsoka episode. 

Increasingly believe that to love Thrawn as a character, you have to have been reading Star Wars novels in the nineties. To me, he's dull and one-note. His only advantage is that the narrative gods consider it important to let him win at things occasionally; this at least can create some real suspense since it can mean there needs to be a token victim. He fits well into Star Wars, though would be hopeless in a show like Andor. 

Baylan is a much more interesting antagonist; he seems like more of a person and less of a type. 

Enjoyed the opening scene: Ahsoka and Huyang: "A long time ago in a galaxy far far away..." 

Liked Ezra's actor; as people have said elsewhere though, his actual appearance did seem anticlimactic. The same with the whole visit to another galaxy thing. A huge amount of effort seems to have gone into the scene introducing Thrawn, his ship and his soldiers; a pity some more couldn't have gone into the writing and design of the not-very-Other other world. 

1 minute ago, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

The “hardest” drug I’ve ever used is alcohol.  FYI.

Ok. Thank you for telling me that. 

31 minutes ago, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

Cigarettes are and always have been disgusting.  I speak as a child who was raised by smokers and was involuntarily subjected to smoking for years.  

One of the favorite moments in my life was when my Mother came to visit me in my first apartment and the pulled out a cigarette inside my apartment and I just said “No”.

She got indignant and went outside.

Personally I'm not against banning smoking though I wouldn't say I'm exactly for it either. Bearing the Rat Palace experiment in mind, I'd rather the government worked at finding ways to make life tolerable for people without them needing drink and drugs to get through it. 

However, Sunak's party have been bleating about the nanny state for years. Restricting someone's liberty isn't normally their thing, unless that person is an asylum seeker, poor, black etc.

That said, socially smoking tobacco, even vaping, now does seem to be very much something for people from the lower ranks or young people on a night out; the middle and upper classes have all moved on to yoga, long distance running and/or cocaine.

Sunak thinking about banning cigarettes though only for Generation-Under-Zs whatever they're called. 

I reckon he's just having a laugh now. Possibly at the expense of a lot of his MPs, who don't seem the kind to like this sort of measure. 

Maybe a polling company has identified a new swing voter: "Anxious in Chipping Barnet", early forties with kids, scared of cigarettes, foxes and Himalayan balsam. 

18 hours ago, LongRider said:

This seems so funny to me.   
 

Feel free to contribute to the thread, Scottish battles and other Scottish history is all welcome.   

Have just realised today is a very important date. 

It is of course Bilbo Baggins's birthday. (Frodo's too.) On this day in the 3001st year of the Third Age, Bilbo held his farewell party. The best historical dates are always the fictional ones. 

For my next post, I swear it'll be about something that isn't a Scottish battle. 

...

But for now on with the Battle of Prestonpans! 21 September 1745.   

Instead of charging the Hanoverian forces head-on in the afternoon, Charles Stuart for once listens to good advice – they wait till the early hours of the morning, then a local man leads them on a path through the marshy ground, one so narrow they have to go three abreast. But it works; the inexperienced dragoons on the left flank of the Hanoverian army panic and flee as soon as the Jacobites attack. The infantry are left exposed, and they break too. 

The English General Sir John Cope had his name rather ruined following his hasty retreat after losing a fifteen-minute battle. Possibly unfairly, given the generally low quality of his troops; he was the sort of guy who sends notes to his superiors along the lines of 'these gunners are a disaster; pls send better gunners' and gets completely ignored and subsequently blamed when the gunners run away before firing a shot. So unlike the modern workplace. 

At fucking last. 

Jeremy Hunt managed a few tendrils of arselick ("a formidable operator"), but all the politicians who would have crawled before him yesterday seem rather quiet today. 

Hope the man enjoys his remaining life as King Lear.