“Who has a better story than Bran the Broken? Let’s make him king!”
Okay, not happy in the moment, but it was supposed to be. I’m still mad about it. Of all the shows I’ve re-marathoned, I’ve never even been tempted to redo GoT. It was like S8 was so bad it went back in time and ruined the entire rest of the show. I can’t even entertain watching any spinoffs.
I may buy the rest of the series as novels (ha) but even then it will be with trepidation.
If you watch, binge, all seasons se08 becomes more logical. There are small markers all over the series predicting it all. I didn’t pickup those at first (weekly) watch.
I say more logical, not logical.
Se01-se06 are still TV magic. Se07 (dany’s attack on the lannister convoy comes to mind) still is good and se08 just speed runs everything.
I still think that was their only true mistake: speed running the season. It gave us everything we wanted. But in such a way nobody could enjoy it all. Jaime finally becoming true good only to return to his true love? (some very powerful acting there) Check. The long night? Check. End of the night king? Check. Ice dragon? Check. Arya voyage finally given meaning? Check. Jorahs redemption? Check. Cleganebowl? Check. Cersei dies? Check. Return of the mad king queen? Check. Theon’s redemption? Check. Destruction of kings landing? Check. Etc etc etc. It ticks all the boxes and more you didn’t even know they existed. It’s just that it ticks them in such an insane speed which results in gaps in the storytelling. Gaps of which some are filled if you binge it all but most will not.
Se08 had to be 2 seasons. Season 8, ending with the long night, se09, the fall of the red keep.
Yes, the 2nd dragon had to die for the sake of the story. Missandei had to die to cement Cersei being the baddest cruel bitch and complete dany’s arc to insanity. But like this? That was stuff for an entire episode. Not the final three minutes of one.
You listed a lot of things that were foreshadowed largely in the books. I felt that the dialogue just about immediately fell off as soon as they ran out of book. Everyone felt very much on their own “tracks” and did not veer past that starting immediately with how they dealt with Jon just…coming back at the start of the season. Characters started teleporting wherever they needed to be, and episodes started feeling a lot more like a poor combination of big budget action scenes and desperate attempts to connect those by having two characters talk at each other alone in a room.
I feel like Jaime’s failed redemption arc was missing something (maybe a couple books worth of further development and foreshadowing?) and the whole Bran debacle felt like it was really supposed to be something and they just “kind of forgot” to ever actually set it up.
I think there are some good reasons GRRM has had such trouble finishing the series and the show runners just never even noticed and steamrolled straight to the end.
It’s a beast to wrap up and hit all those notes and do it before the heat death of the universe. That’s why we haven’t gotten a book in a decade, and likely never will again.
The hubris to think you can do it in eight episodes of television? Unimaginable.
Thinking back on that series, I'm still kind of amazed at what we witnessed with S8. Not the season itself, obviously, but the phenomenon of it.
GoT was a huge fandom. Everybody was talking about it, for years. People were fuckin' naming their kids after those characters.
And then S8 happened and the whole thing was just gone. That entire enormous fandom erased more or less overnight. A moment of confused outage and then... silence.
So, working backwards, thirdly, the books are excellent. The first three are by far the best and cover up to season 3/4ish. The next two are good, but also different. The show also really starts to diverge so kinda up to season 6, but only in the broadest sense.
In either case if you’re going to read the books, read them all for full background. If course we’re still waiting on at least 2 more new books, sooooooo you might be waiting a while/forever.
Second. The House of the Dragon TV series. I was also hesitant to watch it, but it really is great. It’s not perfect, but if all we ever got was this one good season, I’d be happy. If season two ends up sucking, bummer, but at least we had one good one.
And firstly. King Bran. The biggest issue with Season 8 is that it just rushes to the ending. Bran has the best story? He is a weird raven character now. What does that mean? Who understands what that means? What did he actually do? What about Meera?
But what if we knew more about this three eyed raven character? What if we understood their goals? What if they foresaw the events of the series? What if they caused, or guided them? Hodor’s purpose was to eventually save Bran. To do that Bran would have to make Hodor, Hodor. What if he helped ensure other events also took place? What if Bran being “King” was a setup from the beginning?
If all that is properly explained, I don’t really have an issue with King Bran.
Of course that only explains it for the viewer. To King’s Landing Bran is just some weird kid.
So let’s change Bran’s role slightly. The White Walkers are going to attack. The only way to win is with a united Seven Kingdoms. By the time Dany arrives the kingdom is largely united. However Dany has dragons. Can Bran convince Dany to give everything up and focus on the White Walkers? We see hints of this in the show. If the White Walker threat isn’t fixed in one episode, what happens?
There are multiple seasons of story, and that’s just Bran.
They key points of the show can still work (some of them at least), but they need time. Think of the Red Wedding. Arya’s seasons long journey is nearly at an end. Caitlyn and her negotiating is paying off. Robb is about to achieve victory. Three seasons of setup, executed perfectly.
Realistically, looking back, season 8 was never going to be able to wrap things up. Even less so with a reduced last season.
The show runners fucked up and they fucked up big time.
I did read the books on the original series. I have but haven’t yet read some of the others (I have at least one audiobook that was free at the time). I absolutely loved them, after sitting in shock as one “main character” after another was killed in a horrible and tragic way. I had gone in cold, and did not realize that GRRM took the authorial advice to “kill your darlings” quite so literally.”
I didn’t get into them until the pentology was finished, and I remember wondering to myself “Who the hell does he finish this? He’s introduced a major new plot line on the third book (maybe it was the Dorne subplot) and new, major characters kept popping up. I had no idea how he was going to start tying everything together, because even the last book had not started winding things down quite - the tensions were still building. It felt like he was painting himself into a corner while doing the floor like the ceiling of the Sistine chapel. Given the pace of subsequent development, I think I may have been just a bit right on that. I’ve done it to myself and recognize the symptoms.
I appreciate House of the Dragon being good. The problem is that S1 was also good. The problem is in the prequel-ness itself. I know that it all ends with Dany going inexplicably insane and Jamie’s arc goes from scoundrel to hero to … whatever the hell that was. I know the complex plot lines they’re setting up will never be closed. If GRRM ever finishes the book (I’m certainly not expecting two) and winds things down properly, I might again feel invested enough in the universe to try the other stories set in it, but right now it might have just ended with “and then Ned woke up and realized it was all a dream.”
Lastly, you raise a good point and that would have at least maybe delivered some interest. I can’t see anything but civil war with Bran as the bored and incapable god-emperor facing a Stark-Lannister alliance or something. The problem is that the most central and intriguing plot lines were left hanging or ended in the fastest and worst way possible.
“Dany forgot about the Black Fleet?” A queen capable of bringing her people from the literal point of extinction to conquering the known world, with a team of advisors and tacticians forgetting about a major armed force whose betrayal and push for conquest was well known? That’s like “The President of the United States forgot they were at war with China who had dispatched their fleet to attack Washington.” And then to have a ballista, fired from the pitching deck of a sailing ship, and hitting not only a moving target but a flying one? No one in history has ever shot a ballista at a moving flying target, to my knowledge, then pull in the wind and the waves.
I really only picked on Bran in particular because that was the ending-ending. From top to bottom it was absolutely terrible with every authorial decision worse than the last.
Like I said, I think GRRM painted himself into a corner. I think he gets some of the blame, because the show runners are obviously nowhere in the league of GRRM when it comes to story creation, and I don’t know how involved he was at that point. I don’t know if he skimmed a paragraph and signed off or what. Honestly, I don’t think even George knows how to finish his story because he kept adding one more thing. He’s a mature writer and gifted author, but I don’t have a competing hypothesis right now.
I do blame the showrunners for deliberately turning out an absolute piece of crap just to finish the thing even after being offered additional seasons by HBO. It was the worst example of deus ex machina I’ve ever seen.
My wife and I literally started our first conversation with abortion. I’d jokingly mentioned it because she said she liked deep conversation and she went “fuck it, let’s go.”
“Fuck it, let’s go” has been our life philosophy ever since.
We got a set of stainless pots and pans last year and as long as you heat the pan before you put food in it, I’ve had less sticking than in my old non stick pans.
I have parrots so no telfon anything in my house. Bought two Green Pan ceramic skillets fairly cheap and they are still going strong a decade later. Definitely don’t use metal utensils in them.
Anodized aluminum is porous, that’s how the dye stays attached. Also aluminum is not recommended for use with acidic foods. I would personally avoid it.
Aluminum is porous. Hard anodized aluminum is not. That's the whole point of anodizing the aluminum, so that it creates a barrier that stops it from reacting with acids.
The barrier to acids comes from oxidizing the surface, which anodizing does. But pores do not exist in bare aluminum, and hard anodize actually has the biggest pores! There is technically a sealer on the surface, but sticking it in hot water can sometimes release it, depending on what sealer was used. Here’s an article with more info: lightmetalage.com/…/introduction-to-anodizing-alu…
That's for general anodizing, not hard anodizing for cookware. They aren't going to use the same process for a chair that will never see water versus a pan designed to be immersed in water. Anodized cookware is fine to use with acids.
Can you give me an example? Calphalon for instance have “hard-anodized nonstick” but they’re still teflon. Anodizing is actually how teflon is usually made - the anodizing makes a porous surface that the teflon can stick to. So you’right that the sealer is different, it’s just teflon.
Correct, hard anodized does not equal Teflon. But point me to a link selling just a hard anodized pan. If you search “hard anodized cookware” the top links are all hard anodized + teflon (“nonstick”). Tfal, Calphalon, Cuisinart…
They all seem to be ceramic-coated. So. When will you admit that hard-anodized is porus, requires a coating, and the coating can still be teflon? “Hard Anodized” is a useless keyword.
I'll admit that you simply want to do everything possible to prove me wrong on a single point on a post that has nothing to do with that you're arguing about. Seriously, I'm done trying to convince you of anything. Have a nice day...
First of all, if you’re going to buy a fancy expensive non-stick pan, spend the money and buy non-metal utensils to use with it. don’t.
FTFY. Expensive non-stick has no practical benefit over cheap non-stick. They all wear out in the same amount of time regardless of price, so you might as well buy the cheap stuff so you don’t feel as bad when it’s time to throw it out.
Otherwise, I’d prefer tri-ply stainless clad aluminum to anodized.
In the pan itself sure, but there’s a lot of difference in the handle & weight between cheap and fancy though. All of my cheap ass nonsticks have had the plastic handles fall off before they start peeling
Hmm… maybe go for something on the cheaper end of the scale but not the absolute cheapest, then. Stuff from T-fal/Tefal (which is the company that invented nonstick cookware, by the way) has been cheap but decent in my experience.
Yeah I have a 3TB data cap with Proximus on Belgium. Telenet never had a cap, but both mobile and landline signal where I moved to is far better with Proximus.
I am hoping that is counts for downloads only and not uploads (seeding)
Absolute robbery, but at least the prices are around half of what I paid in the US for phone and internet. 70€ vs $145.
Yup. Researchers will gladly send you the study for free, because they don’t make anything when you pay for it through a journal. For the unaware, the fee charged by research journals goes completely to the journal; The author/researchers don’t get anything for it. In fact, they have to pay the journal to get published. And that shit isn’t cheap! The more prestigious journals can charge upwards of $8-10k.
The research journal scheme is a giant scam, designed to double-dip and extract profit from both ends. And it only works because scientific communities tend to look at certain journals as prestigious. So they want to be published in those journals, even if they have to pay. But I can almost guarantee that the researchers resent the journals, because they’ve been roped into paying for research for their entire professional lives. And that’s why they’re usually happy to send you a free copy of their paper if you just email and ask nicely.
Journals are also bad because they frequently privatize research that public funds paid for. For instance, let’s say the government pays for a study to be done. Then the researchers need to get that published, so they pay the journal to publish it. Then the journal paywalls the study, even though it was already paid for with tax dollars. It’s shit that sounds like it should be illegal, but is commonly accepted for some reason.
Shouldn’t research stand on its own? Like, if you have something that is legitimately worth looking at, wouldn’t people be interested in it regardless of where its ‘published’?
The issue is visibility. Just like self-publishing a book, you’re in an uphill battle to even get your work seen. If you ever want to be cited by future publications, your research needs to be easy for future researchers to find and access. And traditionally, that has been done by consolidating studies via scientific journals.
Sure, you could try to start your own FOSS version of a journal. But that will require web developers, hosting costs, and the enthusiastic support from (and adoption by) other researchers. Because if nobody uses your system, it’s worthless for it’s intended purpose.
But that will require web developers, hosting costs
Google docs, or any of its many alternatives.
Because if nobody uses your system, it’s worthless for it’s intended purpose.
That system is called the Internet, good sir. If people want to see the results of a study, locking it behind paywalls isn’t going to make it easier. Lol.
Universities usually have contracts with many journals to provide access for their students/employees. The paywall to access research does not necessarily get paid by the individual.
In my old Uni, as long as you were connected to the internet from inside the Uni or via proxy from outside, it would automatically give free access to the web versions of lots of (although far from all) journals.
If the author of a paper isn’t excited at the idea of sharing their work with an interested party, I’d honestly immediately question the value of their academic contributions anyway.
But there’s some things you shouldn’t pirate. I was a freelance developer for a company. They hired another set of freelancers who used stock photos and music, but didn’t have the proper licenses. Had legal papers sent their way.
I learned about it because the company started demanding I provide all the proper licensing of my code and the libs I used. I have no idea what the details are or what happened. But they were pretty freaked out.
This is most important comment, understanding threat vector is most important.
When evaluating if piracy is a problem, understand first who is likely to take action against you.
Using adobe suite and providing finished work to client that will use it. Very few threat vector since your client will never publish the psd(or whatever) file to the world and so adobe will never know.
Now if we change some assumptions and the work you do, your client publishes publicly, or sells to a third party that you do not know or can control. Now you are in uncertain territory. If its published publicly there is a small chance adobe may check meta data to verify licence. Or if its sold to third party, maybe third party uses it in a way that ends up revealing same meta data to adobe. Then adobe may give a shit. Chance probably still small but non-zero.
So understand your use case and who will have access to raw files and metadata. As long as that stays within areas you have control or have reasonable certainty. Adobe has no way to figure it out.
I have been regularly sharing shit with friends that I see in Lemmy, and they always said to me why my links always have weird names and domains and shit… so I proceed to explain and we get to nowhere.
Anyway this is people that weren’t even into Reddit, so that people are the harder to get, IMHO.
I’ve had success describing it as “imagine you owned the server your Facebook info was stored on but could still interact with all other Facebook servers”. It’s a little simplified, but it usually gets the point across.
Sounds like a “them” problem, you keep doing what you’re doing. Maybe they’ll eventually get it, maybe not. Unless you give up sharing content with them entirely, of course, but that’s your choice.
When the perceived problem is lack of content, why is the solution always to throw more bot posts at it? I’ve blocked or site-banned pretty much every bot account because they’re just adding dead end posts and noise.
For Mastadon content, Lemmy just needs the ability to follow individual users. Not sure if that’s on the roadmap, but it should be straightforward to implement. Same goes for other ActivityPub platforms. When user-follow is possible, that opens up many avenues for users to subscribe to just what they want.
What you’re proposing is not really adding content, just clutter and the appearance of content.
Give Lemmy time, and it will grow organically. Let’s not try to force feed it with reposts from bots. As people discover Lemmy, if half or more of what they see is dead end crap reposted via bots, then I personally feel that will be a turn off for many (which defeats what you’re trying to accomplish).
For Mastodon: this isn’t the same as you are saying with the user-follow. In your case, each users follows the users that they want to see, and they can partecipate in the comments of that post, but they will see ALL of the posts of that user in their timeline/feed. Here, the community choose what users/hashtags/instances to follow, the best posts get selected and they get posted, without being spammy. You don’t have to see everything, but only the one that both were highly-ranked on Mastodon and they were upvoted on Lemmy. At the same time, you can’t control exactly what sources are selected, but you can also interact with the community in order to drive the moderators to change the sources list, or you could just change/make a new community based on Relly. They are two different approches, that could live in symbiosis (ex. You select your own Mastodon users to follow, and the only Relly’s Mastodon posts that appear are the one that you didn’t already saw in your personal timeline [this would require collaboration with the Lemmy Server Development Team])
Some other additions:
This isn’t the same as other bots that keep on posting contents, thanks to Limits, objectives, top posts, …
Being moderated by the moderators/admin of the community/instance, the quality threshold is/should be higher.
Content is created by users who want more content. We can provide more content, and slowly stop pumping from the outside, until Lemmy is fully independent. (see Dynamic limits in my original post)
Now that I think of it, it might be a good idea to make a reverse bot, which takes the top posts from Lemmy and posts on Reddit/Mastodon/…, while providing the link to the original lemmy post, in order to drive more traffic and engagement
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