Maithanet

Apparently the Broncos gave up a 2023 first (from Miami) and a 2024 second (with a third rounder coming back). That is an amazing haul for New Orleans. Broncos gave virtually no draft capital between this and the Wilson trade. And in both cases they got fleeced. The broncos are not contenders.

Michigan scored 24 points in the 3rd and only cut their deficit by 4. Yikes.

That taunt would have more punch if they hadn't already lost earlier today.

Michigan looks better than they were last year. Georgia looks about the same (perhaps a bit better on offense and worse on defense). Michigan was outclassed by Georgia last year, but I think it'll be a lot closer if they both make the championship. Georgia would still be the favorite, but you can't just pencil them as champs quite yet.

We haven't been using any apps, no. I will check and see if they are helpful.

Last year the board game thread recommended I try out Jaws of the Lion rather than the full Gloomhaven, and that was an excellent recommendation! It is a bit simpler, but way cheaper ($40 bucks instead of $130 for the full game), and it is still a whole bunch of content such that my friends are unlikely to finish it for years (we don't play that regularly). So thank you @Werthead for the good recommendation. I will particularly compliment the Learn to Play setup of JOTL. The first five missions are fairly easy, but they introduce the different elements of gameplay gradually so that it you can get started without feeling overwhelmed. It was a well designed, and still fairly fun tutorial. The only real downside I'm finding for this game is that the game elements do not fit in the box, so it only half closes, and after playing through 6 scenarios, the box is already starting to show some wear. Oh well!

I second those that the writing is the biggest downfall of WoT season 1. Across any medium and time, that if you have series that makes less sense the more you think about it, then it starts to suck. And while the WoT book series is very flawed, it is pretty carefully crafted and thought out, and in the places where Jordan did have some errors, people have pointed them out so they could be corrected in an adaptation. Now, you are going to have to make changes to a WoT adaptation; that is a given. But when the climax of season 1 is a mix of things that only make sense if you read the books, and things that make no sense whether you read the books or not, it's pretty disappointing. I really wanted to like this series, and I am totally fine with them making changes (even big ones!) to make it work on screen. But the changes they made were not good, and the final product was just a mediocre mess.

People seem to be arguing that being specialized towards one particular aspect of athleticism (say running in a straight line very fast) is "more athletic" than being in the top 99% in most/all aspects of athleticism, even if you aren't quite in the top 99.9999999% in any single one of them. That argument makes no sense to me. Plenty of NFL guys were track stars in college. Like, could quite possibly make the US Olympic team fast. But they instead focused on football and become receivers or cornerbacks because they also had the other skills (upper body strength, lateral quickness, hand/eye coordination) that are needed as well. And they did that because virtually nobody becomes a millionaire running track, whereas the hundreds of guys get that playing football.

Barry Trotz fired by the Islanders. They missed the playoffs this year, but made the conference finals the previous two years before that. Seems like a pretty strange move. But I wonder if there's something about Trotz that just rubs people the wrong way, because he was allowed to walk from the Caps after they won the Cup. So twice in five years Trotz is out of a job in spite of having won the cup and made the conference finals two other times in that span.

I just finished the book, and I felt like as an individual book, it was a pretty weak entry (possibly the weakest of the series). The pacing is poor, several key characters are weak, and the Dreamer sequences are IMO a real chore. But as a finale of a 9 book series, it is totally successful. The final showdown goes the way we expected, but it really works. Bringing Miller back was great, I actually laughed out loud from his first line. The buildup over nine books had a real payoff and made sense, something many good authors have failed to deliver. In all, being a successful conclusion is much more important than being a strong single entry. A bad conclusion could undermine the 8 books that came before, and this instead enhances it. This series has been a great ride, and I look forward to rereading it in a few years.

Great writing rewards rereads and reexamination of the ideas presented in it. In the case of Bakker, it feels like he was trying to create this effect by planting seeds and teasing ideas that in the end were never followed up. What we actually got in TUC was...pretty underwhelming. In general the Aspect-Emperor quadrilogy was not nearly as well edited or as tight as PON and TUC was easily the worst in that regard. Not that a better editor could have solved all the problems of TUC, but they could have solved a lot of them. Giving a little more time to Esmenet/Mimara/Akka's arcs at the end and a little less time to weird rape-madness would be great start. Just think about the arcs that Esmenet or Akka or Conphas had in PON. They are clear and the decisions/personalities of the characters propel them to where they end up. What is Mimara's arc in the second trilogy? What purpose does Akka's entire journey serve? Why do we need to spend so much time with both of them when nothing they do matters to the overall plot, and their characters don't particularly change? Why is Esmenet a POV character, when she makes no meaningful decisions in the four books? Would the entire Momemn plotline really suffer if we had it entirely from Kelmo's perspective?

You know that is almost a quote from Lion King? Scar (talking to his brother): Well, as far as brains go, I got the lion's share. But when it comes to brute strength, I'm afraid I'm at the shallow end of the gene pool.

I'm curious, are reporters actually trying to figure out which players are and are not vaccinated for potential fantasy implications? We found out this week that Kirk Cousins is not vaxxed, which is pretty disappointing.

I find a little water helps.

Yeah, I was wondering if I should bring up HITB on my first post in this thread, but decided against it. There are some things it's best to ease into, such as inserting someone else's heart into your own rectum.

I thought it was just a straight up miracle performed by Kellhus. Not magic (he doesn't know magic, and this doesn't feel very similar to the rules of magic in the series anyway). EDIT: Fitting that the miracle Kellhus performed was not to help anyone, but to establish his dominance over the situation.

Speaking more generally, I really enjoyed the first trilogy as well. It definitely had it's flaws, particularly with the women characters (why are the three women POV characters a prostitute, a different prostitute and a genetically engineered monster who uses sex for manipulation?) But the worldbuilding is top notch, the politics are interesting and Achamian, Cnauir and Conphas are great characters. The second series (four books) is not as strong. The biggest flaw is just that it needed a strong editor, and it pretty clearly didn't have one. Some plotlines kinda fizzle, some parts feel totally unnecessary and go on for dozens of pages. The ending...is not to everyone's taste. But the good parts are still really good, which makes it worth reading if you are a fan of the world overall.

I actually picked up and read some of the final book (The Unholy Consult) just yesterday, so interesting that a Bakker thread pops up now. You are correct that there has been a lot of discussion of these books, although that discussion has mostly disappeared since book 7 came out. People are generally not optimistic that the final duology/trilogy that Bakker has in mind will ever be written. I don't think you really want me to answer this. Based on what you've written I think you understand well enough to keep going. Kellhus knows the Dunyain and the way they follow the Logos, which he can still do himself. But he is no longer a slave to the Logos as he has undergone a transformation on the circumfix, and thus is no longer like other Dunyain. He is following a different path, and that is, from the perspective of a Dunyain such as Moenghus, no different from going mad.

One thing that I read about Big Trouble in Little China that I really appreciated is that in this movie, Kurt Russell's Jack thinks he's the hero, because he's the muscley white guy in an 80s action movie. But he's actually the comic relief character - he's always getting beaten up, his ideas are bad, and he rarely accomplishes anything. Instead it is his short, unassuming Chinese friend Wang who is the actual hero driving the plot.

We have amazon prime for delivery reasons, and we generally toggle between subscribing to Hulu and Netflix. We've had Hulu for over a year now, and there isn't anything on there I'm terribly attached to at the moment. Might be time to cancel and see what Netflix has.

I had the exact opposite happen. I was horrible this week and still moved into first, because week 3 is getting dropped!

I would also like an invite.

Welcome to the Board! I dunno, that's a long way off if it's foreshadowing, but anything is possible. On last night's episode, I thought it was pretty good. Most of the first two episodes has been (IMO) cleaning up from the mess left of Season 2, episode 10, which I thought was just terrible (easily the worst in the series). They never did explain how Sam survived having a wight army see him only a few steps away, but mostly ignored that for Season 3. Dany's story also seems to be going better. I liked the Brienne/Jaime fight. I thought it was reasonably tense, and while it might have been more fun to have them crashing through the forest and the stream, that would have been harder to shoot, and this was an understandable and acceptable scaling down of things. I have no problem with Jaime getting overpowered as he was, I actually found it somewhat ridiculous in the book that he was able to hold his own with Brienne as long as he did, given his disadvantages. The Catelyn scene, people are really overstating the degree to which this changes her character. I personally can't get too worked up about it. I am really loving Margery Tyrell in this show. Her expanded character is turning into the best change the show has made. The Sansa/Margery/QoT scene was excellent. I agree with the Shae hate, her scenes are poor and really don't make any sense. Is she going to threaten Littlefinger if he makes a move on Sansa? Please. Littlefinger isn't going to be too impressed with her hidden knives. But overall, I think that the first two episodes of Season 3 have worked. I hope that they don't dilute themselves too far, the episodes are already very jumpy. It is unfortunate that the show, while simplifying lots of things, is also expanding many secondary characters into main characters. Margery, Robb, Theon are all getting tons of screentime, when none had a POV in SoS. The result is that the show has to bounce around a LOT, and there's just no way to check in with every mainish character in a single episode anymore. They need to try and tighten things up however possible.

I enjoyed episode 8 a lot. The one thing I really wish they hadn't cut was Tywin maneuvering the Mountain Clans to fight for him. In the books, he says they should fight for him, and offers decent weapons in return. The Mountain men refuse, because Tyrion already offered him weapons in exchange for his life. So Tywin starts praising both the Hill Tribes and the Northmen for their martial prowess. He says that even his bravest knights fear to fight the Northerners, and if the Mountain Men are too afraid, then he understands. The Hillmen immediately scoff at the Northmen, and agree to fight to prove their ferocity. It was a quick about face, but it made more sense than what they showed on screen, which is that the Hillmen seem to have no problem being conscripted into Tywin's army (??). Plus, it showed what a snake charmer Tywin can be, which is important to establish early on. Not a big deal, but I thought it was something of an important scene.