Thursday, May 02, 2013
Baseball’s symphony of sounds
(espn.go.com)
Peavy smiles and says: “I try not to yell; I try not to swear. But at 7 o’clock every night, I turn into someone different. I’m out there trying to focus. I’m competing. I can’t control myself. But I have three little boys. I want them to be able to watch their daddy pitch without hearing all the yelling.
Read More...Dunn smiles and says: “I make fun of Jake. I mock him. I can’t even make the sound he makes when he’s out there; it will hurt my throat. We do an over/under on when he’s going to first yell at ...
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< 1 2 3 >Her what now?
It was 4.2, actually...
If I told you, it would be a spoiler. :) Lets just say that a certain legend with dragons require more than one person riding a dragon....
Ah, my mistake.
Martin was very clear that he originally planned on using a 5-10 year time skip following the events of the third book. In that scenario, we'd come back to find an older, wiser Dany with years of experience ruling a kingdom and full grown dragons at her disposal, ready to claim her birthright. Any necessary ancillary characters could have turned up offscreen.
Instead, he revised his plans but had difficulties maneuvering his pieces into place. Of course, if he just let other characters travel with the same casual ease as Catelyn Stark or Littlefinger, he could have saved himself a lot of trouble.
The Mariners should be Robb Stark. Everyone gets incredibly excited about the new regime and they do well at first, but...
Just finished the last book. It was pretty 'eh'. Good read and all if you like the series, Brandon Sanderson was more than capable as a fill in author, but there were just too many threads to pull together. I really hope Martin pares down the story lines in The Winds of Winter so the final book can focus a bit more on the end-game.
Feels a bit odd, knowing the series I have been reading for 15 years or so is over. Long-lasting series that start in one age group/reading level/development period of one's life and end in another (Harry Potter would be another example I'd think) are tough to judge well.
I dunno. The Royals are constantly suffering from the consequences of their own bad decisions and short sightedness; they seem more like Edmure Tully to me. Hodor is a simpleton with no agency, but it's not really his fault.
Seems like that would make them Cersei, no?
I actually think the WoT books are the next big thing to get adapted. I would have thought the Sword of Truth initially, but I just looked into it and it was already adapted into a crappy syndicated series called Legend of the Seeker.
I did think of that, but Cersei enjoyed tremendous structural advantages that the Royals just don't have. Cersei is the Mets.
Fantasy is the big growth market for adaptations and such, yes. Someone finally realized that the teenagers of the 1980s are now grown ups who watch comic book movies and well done serializations of their favorite books from the 1990s.
Probably, though Tywin also struggled to escape his father's legacy in his own way.
OK, I can buy that.
True!
So just like real life then.
One assumes the episodes will be written by someone other than George R. R. Martin, which should also help.
The Sword of Truth would definitely need to be done by HBO or Showtime, too much bloody torture and sex. WoT could be done easier from a mature audience standpoint, but it would require a substantial effects department. Ultimately I think there is just too much magic action to depict on screen.
Yeah, but once you trim out all the padding from the books, you're left with maybe a 6 hour miniseries.
I'd watch that.
Fantasy is the big growth market for adaptations and such, yes. Someone finally realized that the teenagers of the 1980s are now grown ups who watch comic book movies and well done serializations of their favorite books from the 1990s.
And yet every attempt to make Dragonlance into something that isn't crap utterly fails.
I can't tell if this is sarcasm or not since the GoT was the most pirated series in 2012.
You can't make chicken salad out of chicken ####.
Same problem really applies to the WoT series. Just an incredibly hackneyed premise that was stale back when the first book came out in 1990. A humble farmboy of obscure origins learns that he inherited great power, forges relationships with true companions, then discovers he is the chosen one(!), fated to defeat the evil god of evil. Also, he's an awesome swordfighter. Terrible, terrible stuff.
Yet the same #### seemed to work well for the Harry Potter series. The reason Dragonlance has failed is the same reason the "Legend of the Seeker" series failed. They're made with the budget and production qualities of Xena: Warrior Princess. They're the fantasy genre equivalent of SyFy Original Movies.
SoFI/GoT was selected to be the big cross-over move by HBO because it's relatively easy to film. It's basically medieval war romance with a bit of magic and dragons thrown in. I doubt WoT will ever get the big budget treatment because it's simply too big and sprawling to pare down to a filmable subject matter and still hold the cray-cray devoted fan base.
Also, any big budget adaptation of WoT or anything else would be seen as a rip-off of the GoT franchise at this point.
Yeah, the setting and the fact that the protagonists were children were what really differentiated it. That said, the Harry Potter books were still pretty bad. People like formulaic crap; if they didn't, we probably wouldn't even have the concept of formulaic crap.
The classic "chosen one" story is narcissistic fulfilment. The guy is tapped on the shoulder, receives vast powers, and his every instinct is perfect. Whereas the Potter books are about education -- literally, in the form of schooling, and a moral education where Harry makes bigger and bigger commitments to the world around him. The final showdown with Voldemort is a deliberate anticlimax, because Harry has already reached maturity when he agreed to die in order to protect everyone else.
To be charitable, the reason that premise is so hackneyed is that it works. It resonates with people, and it's part of a tradition covering hundreds of years' worth of myths and culture heroes.
And more importantly, he was a natural leader, and could rally (or manipulate) the forces of good (and sometimes evil) to help destroy Voldemort. Sometimes it was just dumb luck, but as an example, of the seven Horcruxes that needed to be destroyed in order to kill Voldemort, Harry destroyed only one, and that before he even knew what a horcrux was.
One reason why GoT works is because of the very high production values and HBOs reputation for quality television that will get non-fantasy fans (such as my mother) to give it a chance, who then realize it's awesome and continue to follow the show. You're still going to have to get over a high bar for the next major fantasy series, and there simply isn't another fantasy series that has the same level of depth as ASOIAF. Though I would be interested in someone trying to make a 2-3 season Mistborn series.
Also, put me down as someone who really likes book 5 for the reasons listed in the spoiler of #26, at both the Wall and in Essos.
No one big, but they had to recast Gregor Clegane due to scheduling conflicts (unfortunately, because The Mountain Part II is rather a disappointment) and, even more unfortunately, they're going to have to recast (or write out) Ser Ilyn Payne, who is dying of inoperable cancer.
They're going to have kiddie actor problems, aren't they? Sansa seems workable but not sure about Arry and Bran.
I also didn't realize that Boardwalk made that decision for actor reasons and not plot reasons. Is that for realz or a rumor?
You're kidding, right? Harry takes extra lessons om Defense Against the Dark Arts. He creates a petronus in year 3, something which full grown wizards can't do. He creates an insurrection at Hogwarts, teaching others what he knows, to defend the realm.
He's really a guy that you can probably write out. He's a cool character and everything, but in the big picture, he's pretty minor and there's nothing really crucial to the storyline that you *need* him for. And presumably, if Martin plans on making Payne the eventual King or something in the final book, he has 20 years to change that at his pace of writing.
Ilyn Payne would be the perfect monarch, according to the Westeros Libertarian Party. But I suppose they'd probably accept Hodor as a substitute.
It's not my number, man. It's from Entertainment Weekly - check the link.
You don't like it, take it up with them.
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