My Game of Thrones Review (Some Spoilers)

If you've ever read my blog before, you know I'm a fan of Game of Thrones.  I bought the season DVDs, I watched all the episodes, I bought the books.  Now, I'm going to complain about them.

Most of this post will be about the HBO show rather than the books.  But, I'll get to the books, don't worry.

I started the Game of Thrones series a bit late.  I did see the first season before the second season came out, but I wanted to wait until the entire series was out before I watched it.  Also, like everything else, I was always behind the curve.  I have too many interests and I spent far too much time on them to get anything done in a timely manner.

The first season was better than I expected.  The story was big, there were lots of characters, there was plenty of backstory, and the world was big and fresh.  It's what convinced me to buy the books and it convinced me to buy the season DVD set with my limited funds.  Main characters died, and it showed that not all characters were safe.  From a table-top RPG perspective, it showed that sometimes nearly random events can have catastrophic results.  I'm sure these deaths had different causes, but the effects were the same.

I read the first book, but realized that I was going to have to slow down if I didn't want to wait for the end of the series.  George R.R. Martin writes at his own pace, but I hate waiting.  I know he used to write episodes for television shows, and still does on occasion, and that's what the first book felt like - it felt like it was deliberately leaving plot holes open in order to fill them in during later episodes... er, I mean books.  I know it does take a while for a writer to get comfortable with a particular voice, but this was clunkier than I'd come to expect.

I'm not perfect either, so I was willing to give Mr. Martin a chance.

The show, after the first season, got bigger, but the world didn't seem to add much depth.  This is a difficult concept, but I've noticed that the world doesn't seem much bigger than the story.  I'll give an example because I didn't really phrase it right - you ever notice that after the show introduced the Rains of Castamere, it was the only song the characters in the show ever knew?  Then they introduced another song - The Bear and the Maiden fair, and still, those were the only two damn songs that anyone ever talked about.

Y'ever notice that after a character was mentioned as having been born in a part of King's Landing called 'Fleabottom' that everyone mentioned it as a place in King's Landing?  They never mentioned Guilder's Row or Iron Hill or Stone Chimneys (I made those up), but Fleabottom was mentioned several times.  Yes, it makes the world seem a bit more detailed when you bring up disparate stories like that, but it never seems to make it bigger than the story itself.

Maybe that's the problem here - there are a lot of characters and a lot of stories here and there just isn't time to show those extra background touches.  In the meantime, it seems like an episode of Star Trek, where everything happens on the bridge of the ship because they never had time to make a real set for the science labs or anywhere else.

While we're on the subject, what are the chances that every single combat encounter Arya has involves someone she hates from a previous experience?  Every.  Single.  One.

Again, I realize that it's hard to make a series like this with so many main characters with so little screen time.  I don't know how to fix it.  I would imagine that the episodic feel to the show would become even more episodic if they somehow doubled the amount of episodes in a season or the length of episodes themselves.  As the seasons get more complex, I can only imagine that it would get worse, regardless.

Finally, there's the sense of being robbed.  I know that exciting dramatic scenes cost money.  That's the point.  Waiting nearly a year to watch the dramatic fight at the Fist of the First Men was so worth it when they skipped over the fight and just played the sounds of some swords clanging and a couple guys shouting.  Wasn't that supposed to be the cliffhanger at the end of Season 2?

Maybe it's just me, but at this point, it seems like the characters are wandering around, marking time, until they can get to the last season when they can resolve the plotlines.  In the meantime, things happen, but they're less plot-driven than they are emotion-tugging.

Ah well, had to complain.

- Jim

I'm sorry about not writing sooner, but May is that sort of month.  As I mentioned in my previous post, May 5th was the 8th anniversary of my brother's death.  May 15th marked the seventh anniversary of my Mom's death.  I'm not broken in the same way, but I'm still not the person I was before those events and every year requires me to go back and consider myself and what I've done with my life.

As usual, what I see is not good.

But, it is what it is, and repeating the same post over and over isn't going to change it.  I am fixing myself, but slowly, probably too slowly.

- Jim

Hello there.

So, it's May 5th, 2014.  May is that month.  Eight years ago, it was the month of hell that tore all semblance of organization and future from my life.  It's probably silly, but it was the month I broke.  Waitaminute - before I go on, I know how corny that sounds.  Other people live through much worse than I did and they move on.  Other people have broken much worse in their lives than I did as well.  I agree.  In the grand scheme of things, the events of that month weren't all that much and taken individually they should have led to no more than me being sad for a few weeks or months.

But, I'm not other people.  Those events didn't happen individually.  I broke and I never moved on.  I'm not blaming anyone or begging for anything.  It was never about a single person or event but rather that everything happened all at the same time until I cracked.

I've moved on a bit, sort of.  Instead of moving along on the road of life, I took a detour and ended up on a dead-end street.  I'm here, but little more than that.

This post was never meant to be about me, only about background, yet here I am.  Sorry about that.  Today isn't the anniversary of the Month of Hell, today marks eight years after my brother passed away.  I miss you Mike.  RIP.

- Jim

Just wanted to say Happy Easter!

Things are going well.  I've had to take some time to resolve issues stemming from the past week, but things are progressing and are nearly back to normal, or at least normal enough.

God is Good.

- Jim

I was wrong.  I'm not going anywhere, at least for the moment. 

I love my friends.  I'm serious. Life is good.

- Jim

I suffered an enormous setback earlier in the week.  I'm still not entirely sure whether it was a hardware or software failure, but my computer died for a while.  I've brought her back from the dead, but I'm still in the process of picking up the pieces.  The cure was far better than the disease, but they were both nearly as dramatic.  Not much of importance was lost, but restoring the system to its former flow will take some time.

Time that I don't have.  No, I don't mean it like that.  I'm not dying - that I know of anyway.  But, there are other events coming that will stop everything cold.  It doesn't look like there was any way to avoid it and if there was, I missed the opportunity.

I'll probably miss it, so Happy early Easter to everyone.

- Jim

I'd have written a week ago, but I ended up catching some cold or flu bug that was going around and never got around to it.  I'm not seriously sick or anything, but it was seriously getting in the way of doing anything remotely productive.  Hell, at some points, I couldn't even watch television without spacing out and forgetting half of it.

Ah well.  I'm getting better.  Whatever it was, I'm beating it slowly.

The new season of Game of Thrones started.  Amazingly, I watched the episode almost as it was broadcast.  I paused it a few times while playing it to deal with being sick, and I had to rewind it a couple times to check stuff, but that's usually how I watch shows regardless.  Except for watching them right away, I mean.  I love my DVR almost too much.

Of course, I will need to watch it again, later, to keep up with the series.  I dislike waiting a whole week for an episode to come out because details get lost over time and Game of Thrones is a really big series. 

Hmm... I didn't mean to make this whole post about Game of Thrones, but I just did.  Maybe the next post will be about me. 

We'll see,

- Jim

A letter to Baranto Llama

The internet is a crazy source of information, much of it illegitimate and almost all of it involves porn of some kind.  Still, there are crazy nuggets of truth out there for those who are willing to look for it.

No, I'm not suggesting that the missing Malaysian Airlines was abducted by UFOs.  The people who believe that are weirder than most.  Yeah, it's a big universe and yeah, I suppose it's theoretically possible that an advanced civilization travelled hundreds (or thousands, or millions) of light-years to steal our airline peanuts and watch our inflight movies, but until there is a shred of proof besides zero, I'm going to have to choose not to believe it.  Seriously, do these people suspect alien involvement every time they lose their keys and can't find them after fifteen minutes?

Oh yeah, Baranto Llama.  I know it's not his name. 

Recently in the news, there's been another person who complained about the state of foreign affairs while mangling the name of a world leader - namely the President of the United States.  While it's okay if you don't know the President of Uganda (assuming you don't live there), you're probably going to want to know his name if you're complaining about the state of affairs there.

By the way, the President of Uganda is Yoweri Museveni.

Besides, in the era of internet, you should be able to find an accurate spelling of what you're looking for.  Don't give me that autocorrect crap - yeah, autocorrect is moronic at times, but proofreading before you hit send is always a good idea anyway. 

- Jim

Yeah, I know.  I haven't written in a long while.  I've been busy and there's been less results from it.  I have less and less time to spend on new and exciting projects as all the older ones require upkeep.  It's crazy how things work.

At the moment, I'm working my way through the Game of Thrones series again after I got Season 3 on blu-ray.  I've got just over a month before the new series starts, which means I'll have to try to stay away from the internet to avoid all the spoilers that I managed to miss so far.

In the meantime, I'm writing less and working less on other things.  It's the way things are.  Oh yeah - I got the Firefly series on blu-ray last week.  It was a good change of pace from things I was working on at the time. 

As I've said before, I try and keep my Twitter account generally up to date.  You'll find recent highlights over on the right side of the screen.  =======================>

- Jim

Nope, I'm not dead.  Sorry to disappoint you.  I've been busy with reading, writing, reading, family stuff, and reading.  Nothing major to report - just some library books, really, to cross off the never-ending list of stuff I want to do.  I have high hopes about the writing thing, but I'm still in the process of polishing and I'm not going to rush it until I make sure it's the best I could do.

Yeah, I know the real world doesn't operate like that.  I can't either, but since I have some extra time, I want to make sure that I take the time I can.  I can't say that none of it is procrastination or that I couldn't rush it just a bit more, but I will say that much of it is necessary.

There comes a point where good enough is good enough, but I'm not there yet.

High hopes,

Jim

Happy New Year!


- Jim

I just wanted to say, MERRY CHRISTMAS!


- Jim

I've been busy over the last few weeks.  I really have been trying to get stuff done.  It's all largely inconsequential stuff, but it's been stuff that's been sitting around because I wanted to get to it at one time or another.  "Inconsequential" is probably the wrong term here - it's not immediately important, but I consider all such things important.  And yeah, my inability to prioritize makes it that much harder to catch up.

Anyway, I've been working on bigger projects that have fallen behind the wayside - stuff like magazines, article archives, books, and stuff like that.  Movies too, as you can probably notice from looking at my tweets down there on the right hand side of the screen.  The DVR was at something like 95% for a long time.  I'd spend hours working on it, getting it to 90% or 80% and then ignore it as it went right back up.  I finally got mad and watched enough stuff to get it to fifty percent full.  It's a lot harder for me because one show will typically spawn interest in two or three others - mostly science and crime shows.  Then I'll record the occasional movie that I heard about two or three years ago.  Meh.

There is a light at the end of the tunnel.  I won't ever catch up - the nature of information and my nature will prevent it, but I am getting the process under control.  To some extent, it's like food.  You need it to survive, but too much will make you overweight.  So it is with information - you need it to survive and work in the real world, but too much will paralyze you in mountains of data.

To some extent, I suppose this goes back to childhood - for both things.  There were large stretches in my life where both food and outside information were simply unavailable or not available in large enough quantities.  Now that I have enough or an abundance of both, it's easy to overdo it.  As I said, I'm getting control of it, but it's pretty easy to fall off the wagon.

Other things have mostly stopped as I work on this stuff.  It's not completely stopped, and I certainly spend a fair amount of time thinking about it, but there's been little progress to report.  I hope to change that soon.

- Jim

Happy Thanksgiving!

- Jim

I haven't been ignoring the blog so much as wanting my posts to be meaningful.  A daily post about how I'm not getting much done might be accurate, but it's not really saying anything of importance.  Then again, it's possible that what I'm doing isn't important.  That might be more accurate.

Anyway, long story short, it's the end of the year and there is a whole list of unfinished items on my January 1st, to-do list.  Many of them are big projects and it stands to reason that I wouldn't finish them all, especially under the circumstances.  I think I've finished five so far, and two of them were DVD collections.  Yeah, I'm a hard worker.

So, I've been desperately trying to finish whatever I can get finished.  It's not perfect, but there are a few things I'd rather not carry into another year if I don't have to.

- Jim

I finally went to the doctor for my back problems and discovered I had some sort of spasm going on there.  Not sure how that worked.  They gave me some medicine, it works for a while, and then my back hurts again.  I'm not hopeful this'll fix it long term.

I hope everyone had a Happy Halloween.  Take care,

- Jim

Ever since I went to the hospital at the end of July, my back has been in terrible pain, made worse by sleeping.  I don't know what I do in my sleep or who's been beating me unconscious, but it's been pretty close to hell.  The good news is that the back pain is bad enough that I often don't feel my knee pain.  Okay, it's not good news.  The knee pain is still there, it's just overshadowed.  I'm sure if I were stabbed or shot, I wouldn't feel my back.  Somehow it seems like that escalation would quickly get out of hand.

The good news is that it's keeping at my desk more and working on more desk related things.  I'm doing more reading, more watching stuff on my ever-full DVR, and even writing.  It's crazy.  I do have to give up my computer from time to time so my nephew can play StarCraft II, but I don't mind too much.  If my back didn't hurt, I probably wouldn't mind at all.

Anyway, that's about it.  Little new save the ever-increasing back pain.  I have some ideas to deal with it, but those will take time.  Hopefully by the next post, I'll have some improvement to report.

- Jim

One of my nephews has been spending more time with me lately.  His family is living with mine for a variety of reasons.  He's eleven, and not much into the more scholarly pursuits I often attempt.  So, I've been spending time playing computer games with him and letting him play those games on my computer. 

Yeah, I finally got into playing StarCraft II.  Not a game I would have thought I'd be playing for a while, but it's entertaining.  It's not that I don't like the StarCraft story - I've been playing the original game since 2001, but I intensely dislike games that force me to play online, on their servers.  What's going to happen when Blizzard goes under or ceases to support the game?   I can always play the original game, so long as I have a computer that will play it.  The sequel on the other hand has limited offline features and doesn't allow progress in much.  In short, there's little point to play offline at all.

No LAN games.  I'll admit, it's not a big deal.  I don't often like playing with other people anyway, but it would be nice to play with my nephew.  One more thing - my nephew and I can create separate game accounts on the original game and play for the original price.  Not so with StarCraft II - too bad, so sad.  If he wants to play the full game, he has to fork over the money to do so.

Or his uncle has to.

- Jim

Sorry about the wait.  I'm alive.  I spent a long time recovering from being in the hospital.  It's weird, because it was just me being sick - nothing was broken or protruding from anything important, just sick.  Kinda like your mind, after you read the word protruding.

Okay, probably not that sick.  But pretty sick.  When I got back, I was beat up, sore, sick, and suffering from all the side effects of medication.  I'm alive, but I really don't want to go through that again.

Work is slowly picking up.  I spent a lot more time being broken.  I'm not sure what to do about it.  It doesn't seem like anything I try is helping.  I'm not sick, but I'm certainly not the same person I was before I went in the hospital.  Even then I was no prime example of human prowess... but now... fuhgetaboutit.

There isn't much of a plan at the moment.  Get better, get these projects done, find something else to occupy my time.  It won't be hard.  I have enough stuff to keep me occupied until the end of creation at the rate I'm going through it.  We'll see.  Maybe it's something I was never meant to do.

- Jim

Okay, first of all, I apologize. It's been too long since I've written, but much has happened.  I certainly had time to write during much of it, but no access to any sort of computer or internet.

On the morning of the 17th, I got really sick again and went to the hospital. I'd like to say it was nothing major, but it was.  Especially worrying was that it happened so soon after the last time.  This time they tried a longer treatment that was similar to the first except it was less medicine over a longer period of time.  I got out of the hospital late Wednesday afternoon and then spent the next two days recovering and sleeping. 

Oddly enough, hospitals aren't for sleeping much.

That being said, I'm otherwise fine.  I did spend five days without either my computer or internet though, so I'll probably need therapy for years.  I never buy a laptop because a laptop generally can't do the things I ask of my desktop.  I really don't go anywhere either, except when I do.  Ooops.

Anyway, work stopped, writing stopped, reading essentially stopped.  I barely even watched television.  I'm nearly caught up on the whole "going out of my mind from boredom", though.

Anyway, now there's lots to catch up on.  So, I'll try to write soon, but it probably won't be soon enough.

- Jim