FarNearEverywhere
undereducated and overopinionated
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User ID: 157
FarNearEverywhere
undereducated and overopinionated
1yr ago
The reviews I've seen seem to agree that the visuals are great, but the writing - not so much. Slow to get started, keeps jumping from one character to another. I've only seen the trailers, and I didn't like them. Galadriel has been turned into a Mary-Sue, she can take down an ice troll all on her own with a twirl of her sword while her useless male companions just stand around. That's not good writing. They do seem to be taking the standard "bullied girl learns to stand up and fight back, and keeps going even when all the useless men around her tell her to stand down!" Strong Female pattern, which is okay if you want to communicate quickly to a general audience that knows nothing about the characters that this is Kick-Ass Important Lead. But it's not Galadriel.
They have five seasons (if this season is a hit). They have time to establish characters and plot. I hope it gets better from here on in, now that the two introductory episodes are over. I think the best way to approach this is as "Generic TV fantasy show with characters that have the same names, but have nothing to do with Tolkien's characters". That way, it will avoid raising the blood pressure of the canon-knowledgeable, and whatever Amazon does with the characters, we have the consolation of "Well, that's not really Elrond or Gil-galad or Celebrimbor, it's just guys with the same names". And they can appeal to general audiences who know nothing but maybe vaguely remember the movies and like the idea of a family-friendly escapist hour of TV/streaming service (no tits or much gore so far, as distinct from House of the Dragon).
FarNearEverywhere
undereducated and overopinionated
1yr ago
It's the writing, there are too many examples of the script trying for "this is friendly banter, ho ho" but it comes across as weird or 'what did he just say?' or aggressive.
As well as the fake profundity which falls flat - what is the difference between a stone and a ship, indeed.
FarNearEverywhere
undereducated and overopinionated
1yr ago
The showrunners are woefully inexperienced so yeah, going for easily understood, largest audience engagement plot and motivations. "This is Galadriel. She is really important. This is why she is important. She is on a vengeance quest to get revenge for her dead brother. This is why she is going out fighting orcs and trolls".
They're also stuck in that they don't have the rights to Second Age material so they can't show her as the pupil of Melian or married to Celeborn or any of that. So they have to spin up a story of Warrior Princess Galadriel out of what material they have, and to make it easily digested by a general audience (because they can't survive just by getting the hardcore fans, they need as many people watching as possible to buy subscriptions to make Prime streaming succeed) they have to use well-worn stories like 'revenge quests'. Galadriel isn't Galadriel, that complex mix of Noldorin pride and belief in their own intelligence and ability, and slowly growing repentance for the decisions she made and how the entire return to Middle-earth by the Noldor was tainted by Feanor's mad quest for vengeance - she's Girl Power Heroine.
FarNearEverywhere
undereducated and overopinionated
1yr ago
Say hello to Impassionata for me!
FarNearEverywhere
undereducated and overopinionated
1yr ago
Run Clinton v. Trump again, and it's entirely possible Clinton wins.
Not if they run their campaign the same way, which is pin all their hopes on Big Data, because Big Data got Obama elected (or so they thought) and therefore they alienate all the blue-collar white support by assuming they've got those votes in the bag and not bother turning up for the candidate to do the usual "smile, wave, let the crowd cheer for you, move on" visits. Also have venomous in-fighting at headquarters because everyone is so sure that Hillary is going to win, they are all back-stabbing for 'who will be closest to the Empress?' status. And because X is trying to do down Y, when the poor chumps out in the field ask for help or support or advice because uh guys, what we're seeing on the ground is not stacking up with the Big Data forecasts, they get snubbed, ignored, or if they do get X's attention, Y immediately tries to sabotage that.
FarNearEverywhere
undereducated and overopinionated
1yr ago
Do you not remember the "Russians hacked the voting machines" after the 2016 result? There was one lady over at SSC/ACX who firmly believed this happened, even though she was otherwise sensible, and she was a Democrat voter/supporter. There have been conspiracy theories on both sides, so no throwing stones within a glass house.
FarNearEverywhere
undereducated and overopinionated
1yr ago
The trouble is that while the result could be legit, it looked dodgy in certain areas. I had a quick look at Mariposa County, which was one of the results that looked dodgy - red the last election, suddenly flipped blue, when all the other counties were consistent in voting both times. Turned out that just a small swing in votes could flip it from red to blue because it was finely balanced. No need for any fraud, simply a small amount of voters changing their minds.
FarNearEverywhere
undereducated and overopinionated
1yr ago
You can't make Galadriel, Gandalf or Tom Bombadil the main character in any kind of hero journey - it's too late, the journey is over for them. A story about them is a fundamentally different thing and probably too niche to justify the price tag.
Well, Second Age Galadriel is still on her journey - she did refuse to return to Valinor after the climatic battle of the First Age which resulted in the defeat of Morgoth. So Second Age Galadriel is as eager as any of them to believe in the peace, even if she is aware that darkness and danger are still out there, and she is still proud, still Noldor, still hoping to create and rule over a realm of her own.
But that's not the Galadriel we get (so far) in "The Rings of Power". They want to make her young, piss-and-vinegar, out there actively fighting Galadriel; not the mature pupil of Melian and great lady that Second Age Galadriel is. As you say, they want a character for the hero's journey, so they have to shape their version of Galadriel in that mould. That's probably part of why they make Celebrimbor much older, when canonically he should be younger than Galadriel: he's one of the 'old guys' who want to believe all the fighting is over so they can go ahead with their own ambitions. And of course, one of the 'old guys' who is wrong while Galadriel is right.
FarNearEverywhere
undereducated and overopinionated
1yr ago
It's not about hatred, nothing as warm-blooded as that. For Amazon, it's cold pursuit of profit. Forget all the bullshit about Jeff Bezos being a YUUUGE Tolkien fan and the showrunners being big fans etc. That's publicity material for the trade weeklies. They want a big name production that will bring in new subscribers for Prime Video and make it profitable. If the show doesn't pull in the numbers, then it will be dropped (and forget about the five seasons). So they are making huge hay out of "first black dwarf! first black elf!" and all the rest of it to cast their net for the widest possible audience globally. Casual viewers will expect to see black/brown faces in the cast, or at least won't notice or care if there are. The appeal has to go beyond the fans and canon-knowledgeable, because that is not a big enough audience.
And they couldn't just write their own fantasy epic series, because that would have no ready-made fanbase or name recognition. They're competing with House of the Dragon, which is piggy-backing on Game of Thrones and its success. If they put up "Amazon presents 'Generic Sword'n'Sorcery' set in MadeupLand" against that, they'll sink like a stone (and not because they were looking downwards towards the darkness). They're trying to use the popularity of the movies and how that name recognition seeped into popular culture, hence why they bought the rights and why they're using 'Galadriel', 'Elrond', 'Hobbits/Harfoots' and so on.
(I begin to have my suspicions that Meteor Man might be meant to be Saruman, not Gandalf).
They're not one bit interested in being faithful to canon, they want to paste on the names of "you remember this person from the movies" to their generic fantasy story tropes. Not out of hatred, out of "what will fill our coffers with least effort? give the audience a story they've seen ten times before and which won't frighten the horses".
FarNearEverywhere
undereducated and overopinionated
1yr ago
There are two points here:
(1) Okay, suppose we say that the 6 million figure is wrong, and only 1 million Jews (ignoring the Roma, etc.) were killed by the Nazis. They still killed 1 million people, on racist grounds. That's the important part here.
(2) "Don't you care about truth and accuracy"? Yeah, I do. And funny that you should invoke the Kamloops residential school graves, since I'm Catholic. We have our own version of this here in Ireland about mother and baby homes and accusations of mass graves, etc. Now, if they could prove that there were indeed graves of murdered children in Canada or wherever, I would not be nit-picking over "they claimed it was 1,000 graves but it was only 100", I would be angry, ashamed, and looking for heads on pikes. But too often the "querying were the numbers inflated" is not about establishing accurate data, it's to deny anything bad ever happened. No Jews were killed, if any died it was down to natural causes of disease, they were transit camps, the Germans never did anything wrong at all ever.
Which brings me to my conclusion: I don't care. I don't care if it was really 2 million not 6 million. I care that 2 million people were murdered because of their religious/ethnic background, and that is a stain that can never be washed away by any "I calculated the square volume of the claimed number of graves and it is vastly greater than the total acreage of the camp" playing with numbers.
So this is my question to you: why are you asking this question? Is it because you really do want only to calculate a tidy, accurate number - or do you want to say "Hitler and his administration never did anything wrong and the Jews were and are wreckers and fifth columnists"?
FarNearEverywhere
undereducated and overopinionated
1yr ago
I think the problem is that thanks to certain disgruntled former Mottizens and some other interested parties, there's a reputation floating around that the Motte is a refuge for right-wingers (and this means far-right, Neo-Nazis, etc.) so that anyone who is inclined to the far-right, Neo-Nazi, "Holocaust never happened", "HBD is real science that proves some populations are the natural inferiors to white people", types think that this is a refuge that will welcome them rocking up with "hey, anyone run the real numbers on the claimed death camps? you'll be surprised!"
It's the witch problem, as has often been discussed.
(Re: disgruntled former Mottizens, there's a certain person who hangs around on /r/Drama who likes to give their take as to why they were run off the Motte for bravely standing up to the right-wingers, instead of 'how I flounced off in a huff', and according to them this is a wretched hive of scum and villainy that probably at least hums the Horst Wessel Lied under our breath as we post).
FarNearEverywhere
undereducated and overopinionated
1yr ago
FarNearEverywhere
undereducated and overopinionated
1yr ago
Automation is part of it, but what everyone seems to forget is that women and children did work down mines alongside men and much of the reforms were passed because it was felt that this was not fitting with women's social role (not alone to be homemakers but to be modest, chaste, etc.) Women and children then moved on, as you point out, to the factories.
The social driver for feminism was capitalism. While the suffragettes and others were looking for votes for women, and for women to have equal rights with men (and I think we tend to forget the great imbalance legally as regards women and men within marriage and other spheres), there was a limited source of employment for women. Women were dependent on marriage to keep them out of poverty. So broadening the type of work that women could have access to was both a feminist project, to give women economic independence, and an employers' project, to have access to a greater labour force than men alone.
Employing women meant that jobs could be less skilled and more importantly paid less. Now we have modern society where it is expected that you will be a two-income family if you want a mortgage or any other rung on the ladder of achievement (unless you are in a very well-paying job where one person can be the sole breadwinner). Alongside the usual stuff about equality and opportunity and the rest of it, is the admission that having women working helps to grow the economy. I think we're at a point where we're dependent on constant growth or else the bubble will burst and there will be a lot of fallout.
Increasing women's participation in the labour-force and raising their employment rate are paramount to meeting the Europe 2020 headline target for 75% of the population aged 20-64 to be employed by 2020. These can provide a boost to economic growth and mitigate the social and public finance risks related to population ageing.
Buried down in this piece is another reference to this:
https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2022/03/female-labor-force-participation-gender-gap-pandemic/
Engaging prime-age workers in the economy is important for efficiently generating growth by utilizing all the labor resources available for producing goods and services in a given country.
So once all the talk about "gender wage gaps" and so forth is stripped away, the underlying skeleton is that every warm body that can work is needed in order to keep the plates of the economy spinning. Taking time out to have children is a career-killer, if you have a career, and hurts your income if you're working jobs (not employed in a career) since you're more likely to have to work part-time hours in order to run the home as well.
FarNearEverywhere
undereducated and overopinionated
1yr ago
For instance, I think the Lynn/Vanhanen IQ map is for the birds, especially since the 2012 version had to do some tidying up re: Irish IQ jumping up from 90 to 100 (the mainland still remains that bit smarter, even with the new colour codes however, Rule Britannia!) because the data is lousy. Lynn relied a lot on "I don't have IQ test results for this place, but the archipelago near it has this result, so that's close enough" and fudging bad studies.
So while HBD may exist, I think a hell of a lot of the conclusions drawn are jumping someplace that is not steady ground. Are African nations that naturally low in IQ, or is it test-taking ability? Are some of the results (e.g. China) cherry-picked because they only let their brightest take the tests? Do we have any reliable modern data?
We also put a lot of our eggs into the basket of "More IQ means better all round", when we're measuring mathematical ability mostly or solely. Being a whizz at maths does not necessarily mean this is the guy to run the country.
FarNearEverywhere
undereducated and overopinionated
1yr ago
Just plain copy-paste wouldn't be enough for a dramanaut, they would need to spice it up.
FarNearEverywhere
undereducated and overopinionated
1yr ago
No, it's not even that person, because they have a unique style and cannot resist poking the bear. If they were doing it, it wouldn't just be straight up copy and paste, it would include some bait to get us all going so that they could then snip out reactions out of context and run back to show everyone their bouquet of wild flowers.
FarNearEverywhere
undereducated and overopinionated
1yr ago
if you look at the fertility rates, where things end up in 2100 is a race between memetic feminism and genetic traditionalism
To restore fertility rates, you will have to put the genie of the sexual revolution back in the bottle, and I wonder how easy that will be? How, do you think, will you encourage men as well as women not to seek sex outside of marriage, not to seek cohabitation without marriage, not to be serial monogamists, not to put off childbearing, and when they do have children two is the maximum upper limit?
People are complaining about Roe versus Wade, and abortion has only been a 'right' for fifty years. You will be asking people whose parents and even grandparents grew up liberated by the Pill and with the idea that sex is for fun, first and foremost, and that having children is the worst thing that can possibly happen to you, hence why abortion is necessary as a human right. Trying to convince them that the ideal is "get married in your early twenties, have four children, don't sleep around before or while married" is going to be an uphill struggle that makes Sisyphus in Hades look like a pleasant little ramble.
FarNearEverywhere
undereducated and overopinionated
1yr ago
Even before the French Revolution. If you look at the English Civil War and the emergence of radical groups, you see the same pattern, The Levellers and the Diggers were protesting during the reign of Charles I but came into prominence during the period when Cromwell and others were in ascension, Within the New Model Army, due to a mixture of religious dissent and social/political revolutionary views, many of the soldiers also had populist views which in the end Cromwell had to quash.
Whenever there are periods of dissension and opposition, all kinds of splinter movements and extremists come forth and try to push their own views of what the new, reformed, society should be like. If the 'moderates' win out, there will still remain a strain of these views even as germs within the ideology, since you've already overturned the old ways and put your new, reformed society into place. It's just a matter of extension, thereafter.
FarNearEverywhere
undereducated and overopinionated
1yr ago
But why do you have a nightly shower? Are you so dirty that you must wash every night? Are you engaged in strenuous or muddy labour?
It's not mere hygiene at work, since if you have a conventional office job, you're not exerting yourself physically enough to require constant washing. It's the ideal of hygiene. If you skipped a night without showering, would you miss it? Would you feel, somehow, 'dirty'? Isn't there, in a sense, a moral obligation to keep yourself clean according to how you were raised?
And if it were difficult for you to have that shower every night, if you didn't have access to a bathroom and heated water and convenient disposal of same, and easy to keep dry and warm afterwards, then would you shower every night? Increasing convenience, increasing access to what were once 'luxury' resources, increasing space, means that it becomes easier to copy the rich in their habits, and that builds up expectations thereafter, so that I doubt if you could get away today with building a house or apartment that had no shower.
So "poor people should have access to means of hygiene" does arise out of a particular political philosophy, and ends in you having a nightly shower as well as brushing your teeth, because 'this is just how it is done'.
FarNearEverywhere
undereducated and overopinionated
1yr ago
I took that as just tit-for-tat; Biden does a speech calling MAGA supporters the biggest threat to democracy since the last biggest threat, Trump retaliates by calling Biden an enemy of the people. Just standard political mud-slinging especially with elections coming up.
I'm not interested in GoT, ASOIAF or this new show but since the creator is still alive, and apparently happy with the race-swapping, it's legitimate. Sure, it contradicts canon, but he can change canon if he likes! (I don't have much regard left for GRRM as a writer, by this point, and I've always resented his throwaway line about "I always wanted to know what was the tax basis of Gondor. Yeah, that was what the show really needed for a better season 8 - a coherent economic policy). And the point that this is based on a complete book so there is a beginning, middle and end to the story is a good one.
What they're doing with Rings of Power does annoy me. I don't care that much about Tar-Míriel being race swapped, because at least they have a human character played by a human, and looking approximately as you would expect royalty to look. I'm more annoyed about the black Elf and black Dwarf not on racism grounds, but because they've been jammed in there with no attempt at providing a backstory or reason for why they are a different race to others of their species that we see. Where are the other black Elves and black Dwarves? And the media interviews about giving prominent roles to BIPOC are all flannel, because these are not really important characters. They didn't make Durin IV black, they didn't make Celebrimbor black. So the big names and important main characters are all white, still. You can't get much whiter than Galadriel unless you go albino, or that weird Morgoth priest/priestess Eminem look-a-like. But we have a couple of invented original characters, plus background general Númenorean citizens, who are Hispanic or black or Asian, so that ticks off the DEI checkboxes. Actually, now I think of it, that Haradrim village or on the borders of Harad where Bronwyn (new invented human character) and Arondir (our new invented mixed-race Elf) are making cow-eyes at each other should be a hell of a lot browner than it seems to be on screen - again, a lot of white guys so far as I saw. That was a place that could legitimately have been all brown faces, but they dodged on that one, I wonder why? A village of brown-skinned people would fit beautifully with their anti-colonialist, anti-racist theme: "Sure, our ancestors fought on the side of the Big Bad, but that wasn't our fault and it's not right to blame us for the past! Why are we living under military oversight/occupancy by white Elves?"
And since Tolkien is safely dead, and Christopher Tolkien is safely dead, and the estate is happy to take the money and run, they can get away with this.
FarNearEverywhere
undereducated and overopinionated
1yr ago
They think "our audience is not going to be all book nerds, it'll be people who watched GoT last time and want to watch another show set in that world". Same with Rings of Power: they are looking to pull in a general audience not familiar with the canon and who don't care about it, but will remember the last hit TV show/movies and are willing to watch a high fantasy epic and pay for the privilege.
So if people complain the casting is not canon-compliant, they have the easy defence of "That's racism!" and get sympathy points for being attacked by trolls and bigots.
FarNearEverywhere
undereducated and overopinionated
1yr ago
Seaman Caserta ended up manning a snack counter at a distant base.
I'm going to assume there was a lot more going on than "broke his leg, was wrongfully washed out of the course, ended up on a snack counter since he washed out". I've been in a job on the other side of "tear-jerking story on the local radio station and local newspapers", and it's very easy for the people (Caserta, his dad in this case) to make claims about what happened, while the official response can't tell the full story due to privacy requirements, legal constraints, etc.
Our tear-jerking story sounded like a typical tale of heartless red-tape bureaucrats refusing to help a single mother struggling to give her kids a better life. If you knew the real facts of the case, it was very different, And I can't say more than that, due to still being bound by the confidentiality requirements even after leaving the job. So yeah, unless we get the other side of the story from the Navy or the SEAL training course, I'm going to suspend judgement that it happened exactly like that.
FarNearEverywhere
undereducated and overopinionated
1yr ago
The narrative about all-powerful, mind-controlling demonic ads really needs to go away
That's not why I have an adblocker. That's not why I was forced, after years without using one, to get an adblocker.
It's the sheer, unrelenting volume and placement of ads. I couldn't read an online news story without banner ads, sidebar ads, popup ads, autoplay music/speech (which is very disconcerting when you open a page, a voice starts yapping, and you have no idea where it's coming from or how to shut it up), and ads shoved in between every paragraph on the page.
It made any service, be it a website or commercial site or media site, unusable. I literally could not read the news story I had searched for, because the ads crowded it out.
So therefore adblocker. And now I have a much, much better experience because if I really want to find out "six different ways to cut a tomato with our amazing super-sharp knife!", I can go look it up, if I need a super-sharp knife. If I don't want one right now, no annoying ads about it.
I wasn't getting sophisticated, subliminal, slip past your mental guard and persuade you, slick ads with great copywriting and cool visuals. I was getting the equivalent of having my rubbish bin dumped over my head every time I ventured online. That's why I use an adblocker.
Followed on over to kick the tyres and see what was up. I don't yet know if I'm going to participate, but I do intend to lurk (without sinister intent). Good luck with the endeavour!
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