Hope that didn’t come across as a complaint, was genuinely an organic moment of confused contemplation that kinda made me laugh when it happened.

So Thank You for adding some inadvertant fun to my Sunday morning.

Not meaning to be a dick, but I just spent an unreasonable amount of time trying to figure out the pronunciation of Belnder. For a simple typo, that happened so quickly you didn’t even notice it, that word has certainly grabbed my attention, maybe I should go have another crack at getting some sleep.

When gay marriage was being debated here in Australia my sister (who is gay) was super upset the whole time. She talked about how much the fight affected her and wished that people who were against would just understand.

I told her I was a complete supporter of gay marriage for a whole bunch of reasons including:

• human decency
• equality
• people who don’t like gay marriage can just… Not get married to another person of the same gender.
• people should just mind their own fucking business

However I did also point out that a lot of the loudest voices against gay marriage literally did not give a flying fuck about the issue, it was a convenient wedge and distraction for them, the people who need a group to vilify for political reasons would have to find another target for persecution as soon as they lost this particular convenient red rag to a bull.

Today in Australia, I believe, the usual suspects who use fear and hatred as the bedrock of their politics have been able to tap into a deeper vein of ignorance to make Trans people that target.

Used to work in mobile phone sales at a 100% telco owned store, so when things went tits up for customers the licensed stores in our area would tell customers to come to our store as we had employee access that exceeded partner access. I had SO many variations of the apologetic conversation with an elderly person whose family assured them that the iPhone is the easiest thing ever to use. They were happy with a feature phone but had an iDevice shoved down their throat by family members because “they are so easy”. Oh and arranging a change of mind return on an iPhone is a fucking nightmare in Australian Telco land.

They are not the easiest most straightforward choice, unless you use your devices in the constrained manner Apple has decided you will use them. The multiple times I have been forced to use a Mac or an iPhone or IPad, I have found them slow, obtuse and they have an annoying habit of hiding information I want to see. Windows is not really any better, just different.

I kind of see it like any other preference, people assume that because they find something the best then everyone must agree with that take.

I always felt drawn in by the world, and honestly the imagery in the first season had me excited. The remains of buildings and other links to the past were compelling.

I’m sorry, I like the books and my main problems with the characters are Jordan’s insistence on repeatedly recycling the same mannerisms over and over (tugging on braids) not the way they are written on a mental or emotional level.

I guess I just see it differently. I keep on saying that I have to view this as a separate turning of the wheel, where everyone has been sniffing paint.

I don’t really feel that anyone encompasses the character they are portraying, maybe if we are really lucky they take the most obvious surface level characteristic and make that the entirety of the character. They are so busy cutting content out to make door stopper books fit in less than 8 hours of TV while cherry-picking the exciting scenes that there is an increasing amount of disconnection and disjointed story telling. Instead of deliberate action the characters are just stumbling around having things happen.

It feels to me like they are adapting from chapter summaries not the books. Which would maybe be acceptable back in the 1990s/2000s but these days we have stellar adaptations like the Expanse to show how it can be done correctly.

I really wish I had watched what you did. What I saw was not that. Glad you are enjoying it though.

Morbid curiousity in part. Also let’s face it genre tv is dying, if it doesn’t get at least some views then it will get worse. I just wish they would outright state, we are making a series inspired by the plot and setting of insert ip here. Instead of mangling the story of the books.

Without meaning to start another round of complaints, do you not feel that an element of innocence and wonder from the two rivers crowd is missing in this adaptation? I feel like Queen Tylin will look more the fool than the cougar if she ends up even in the story? The Aes Sedai are emotional messes, not the image of serenity and cunning I always viewed them as through the book. I know the budget likely wouldn’t stretch to it but I feel that the Aes Sedai agelessness could be well depicted with current de-aging processes and would have allowed for a visceral demonstration of the effects of stilling… Although looks like that won’t be a plot point anyway.

I could go on. But this whole thing reminds me of the Altered Carbon series, first season digressed from the books, but I could find a lot to appreciate in Kinnamans performance, by season 2 the digressions were becoming silly. If they got season 3 that would have been wacky. I feel like if you can’t do the source, don’t try to do the source and make that clear, that way your writers get to write their own thing in universe as opposed to constantly grabbing the interesting bits and trying to stick them together like a skin suit to wear over their own creativity.

Anyway there’s a coinflip that Amazon will shut it down rather than greenlight another series and I doubt Sony would be able to sell it to anyone else at this stage, so I might not have anything more to complain about going forward. Guess we will see.

I reiterate my statement from last week, this is a distinct turning of the wheel where everyone has been sniffing paint. So many frustrating events as a book reader. I gritted my teeth through this whole season. I don’t imagine this will run for too much longer, but if it does I wonder how they will manage the huge divergance from the source material to what this thing is.

I could almost forgive this in a world where the Lord of the Rings didn’t exist, or the Expanse. But this just seems to me like the writers and showrunners were so excited about getting the rights that they didn’t realise they just weren’t up to delivering on an adaptation that was true to the narrative and spirit of the books. Put simply they are not capable of creating a series that makes sense, let alone one that could be considered a good faith adaptation of the source.

My favourite part of this show is explaining to my wife all the things they excised/changed/ stuffed up at the end of each episode / series, I think I almost have her convinced to give the books a go.

Oh yeah that’s what I mean, the trail of wreckage they leave as they get promoted out of the positions they ruin is astounding.