shoulderoforion

the pennies are starting to drop

and here the rest of us thought the tumblr "guess i'm gonna die" memes were just silliness. guess they meant it, huh.

I don't think any article about generations is doing that when they point out percentages vs other generations. Groups exist, generations are a thing. It's gonna be ok buddy.

"squirrel!!!! ........... and we're rolling, and we're rolling"

Trump is gonna pardon this asshole just to fuck with everyone, because of course he will

Didn't work out for Tony too well, and it's still fresh

None of Trumps picks can successfully administer the departments they've been put in charge of. If he thought a person could actually run anything anywhere but into the ground they wouldn't have been chosen in the first place. Trump's goal is bedlam, every decision made, ever decision differed, chaos, all the time, every where, so he can do whatever he likes, with everyone so distracted by the failure of every institution, there's no time to organize to even attempt to hold his government accountable in any way. And he's got the house, senate and supreme court, just to make sure.

I don't think anyone in the world has ever experienced what the Western world is about to go through since maybe the last days of the Roman Empire, or The Third Reich

Cost of doing business, get moving on laying another cable, simple as

I mean, the first ep is an hour long, you can check it out, make your own judgement, and as I said, I was underwhelmed, but it's in my rotation, and wanted to share some of the stuff which irked me

it's not the lore i have a problem with, it's the sloppy writing hoping those who notice will overlook for the grandeur of the effort. it's the physical and logical timeline they're attempting to shoehorn in reverse while obviously presenting what is essentially the same universe in the same way, just ..... you know ..... so outside of any timeline that might intersect with the movies they can, wacka wacka wacka

Watched the first episode last night, and was left underwhelmed. There's a lot of lore they pack into the first 5 minutes of exposition, which was fine, explaining the origins of the War against The Thinking Machines, and the Atredies/Harkonen feud.

But watching the show, a couple things struck me which took me out of the narrative they were trying to tell:

1. The CGI is just ok, and far more noticeable in the show than it was in the movies, and this is understandable given the difference in CGI budget, but it wasn't as immersive.
2. This story having taken place 10 THOUSAND years before the events of DUNE, humanity is already mining spice on Arakis? Already fighting the fremmen?, The Bene Gesserit is already in ALL the major houses in the galaxy after only 130 years? Valya has personally developed THE VOICE as "something I've been working on" lol? I'm sure this is all in service of how Herbert wrote the book (*edit: this just in, the writer has just learned that DUNE PROPHECY isn't actually based on a Frank Herbert book, witch makes a ton more sense as to why it's so disjointed narrative) , but I was stuck by how little the DUNE universe seems to have changed in 10 Millennia. Just seems like "hey folks you know all the stuff you loved about the DUNE movies, well, here's a TV show that's not meant to step on that cash cow's narrative, but it's the same, just you know 10 thousand years before, really ...... ta-da!"

As an aside I once saw a YouTube video, which tried to explain the lack of technological advancement in the Game of Thrones universe, due to the overwhelming threat Dragons posed, and how that affected the development of modern weaponry, and stymied almost all forward technical engineering progress. Also while I'm ranting, so "thinking machines" are out, to the point of almost publicly executing a little boy for playing with a transformer toy, but the Emperor has a 3D vid holo projector, how exactly does THAT work without thinking machines, i wonder.

Now lastly, and this is a personal preference, I've never been a Emily Watson fan, I find her difficult to watch.

I'll most likely keep watching every Sunday, because for all it's foibles, it's still top notch scifi, though not nearly on the same level as FOUNDATION or THE EXPANSE

Russia has had a concerted, focused, and enormous espionage and spying infrastructure since the 1920's, it's kinda all they're good at, and they are very very good at it. Anyone, anywhere, in the world, who fucks over the Kremlin, needs to live in fear, and preparation for it's reprisals. If you are on their hit list, they will come for you, doesn't matter where you are. For this man, to have chosen to live so openly, was hubris. I mean, the guy hadn't heard about the Skirpal poisonings in Salisbury UK? Russian sending goons sent to poison people in the middle of England, in broad daylight, come what may, and getting away with it? He was a hero for what he did, but foolish in how carelessly he dismissed the threat. And now he's dead. A two year old could have seen this coming.