My blog for extended length posting on gardening, tinkering, and rants.
Main social account: @germ@deletethis.lol
So, The Leftovers just ended and I feel like a hollow shell of myself.
The finale brimmed over the edge with symbolic imagery. While Nora’s arc came to a fairly straight-forward end, there’s much more to discern under the surface. Floods, doves, beads, and goats – what does it all mean?
Let’s break it down.
(more…)I’m suffering from the mother of all book hangovers, and Robin Hobb is to blame. Assassin’s Fate is here to destroy your ability to read another book for months.
A lot of people say they grew up with Harry Potter. I get to say that I grew up with FitzChivalry Farseer, and it’s made me every bit as snooty as that sounds.
We were boys together, when Fitz first met the Fool and Nighteyes. We shared our first rocky relationships. When Hobb came back to Fitz for a second trilogy, we were both grown ups, seeing the world with matured eyes.
Fool’s Fate felt like it wanted to be the ending for the series, but there was something missing. We weren’t quite there yet. Hobb must have agreed. After leaving The Realm of the Elderlings to write The Soldier Son Trilogy, she returned to write seven more novels.
After more than twenty years and seventeen books since we met Fitz, I can say that we have finally reached a solid conclusion.
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I watched PASSENGERS last night.
There was so much hoopla for the script when it was in development hell. The writer, Jon Spaihts, penned the original script for Prometheus. It was later rewritten by Damon Lindelof. Of course, Alien fans blamed Lindelof for their disappointment and pointed to the script for Passengers as proof that Jon Spaihts would have done a better job.
I’m not getting that. Mostly, I’m feeling what those Alien fans felt when they saw Prometheus: this is one of the most disappointing films I’ve seen in years.
When THE LEFTOVERS started, I was certain we’d never see an ending. Nobody would watch this depressing, spiral of a slice’o’life. Like 1% of the world in the first episode, it would depart without getting a final word in.
CARNIVALE had me kind of bitter.
But here we are. A final season! 8 episodes of glorious (and potentially apocalyptic) angst!
Here be spoilers!
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2016. The Year of the Reaper.
What a wild ride. We lost our heroes, we lost our favorite bars. Goodbye Eagle. Goodbye Black Crown. Some parts of the world were turned inside out and upside down, while other parts put an egomaniac in the highest office of power. Oh? And Pebble? The greatest smart watch there ever was? Gone.
Sigh.
Despite 2016 going down in the books as a Very Terrible Year, it’s actually been a pretty great one for me. Which is wild – I’ve been dreading this year my whole life. The year I turn 30.
But I made it a year of transition, and managed to shift my life in a different direction for this next chapter. I left my stifling, corporate dominated job of 11 years and started new. A new job, in a new home, as I gradually inch closer and closer to city life. I fell in crazy, stupid, mushy love, and was lucky enough to travel. International, for the first time. Iceland, Australia – you were wonderful. But I still like Seattle the best.
It’s been a pretty great year for nerds too. Especially gamers! I’m dizzy from the amount of great games that came out in the last three months alone. Some of these I’ve been looking forward to… since… well, the last time I did one of these posts.
I didn’t get to see, read, or play everything. But here are some of my favorite things I did have time for this year.
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Carrie Fisher was long done with Star Wars when I came into this world. When I was born, she’d already established Princess Leia as an icon. Still fresh enough to be relevant, but solidified as an untouchable American monolith. Princess Leia was simply a thing that had always been there.
Return of the Jedi was my first “adult” movie to memory. I had no idea what was going on, but I was in love with the spectacle and magic of it. The Ewoks were everything. I lived for the Ewoks, and I wanted nothing more than to be with Leia as they ushered her away to their tree village.
We couldn’t afford to buy movies at the time, so my parents would buy blank VHS tapes and catch movies as they aired on cable for recording. Jedi was the only Star Wars film we had for a long time, but it was my favorite thing to watch and I wore that tape out.
I worked my way backward through the trilogy. The Empire Strikes Back aired, and we recorded that. This film endeared me completely to Leia. Her frustration and short temper had me in stitches. I would rewind the tape, cackling on the floor as I watched her yell at Han over and over. I had to have more!
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We arrive at the penultimate episode of the season, famously anticipated as the best each year. And I am not happy!
!! This post contains SPOILERS for the BOOKS and the TV SHOW up until this point !!
(more…)The hype train arrived and delivered. Has there ever been a greater hour of television? Winter has come, and so have I.
!! This post contains SPOILERS for both the books and TV Show !!
Do not proceed if you aren’t caught up with both
The other night, a friend and I took a brave trip down memory lane into our first years with LiveJournal. What we found was, unsurprisingly, horrifying. Eleven years ago, we were completely different people. We over-shared, we over-emoted, and felt no fear in doing so.
But so did everyone else. The internet was a very different place, back then.
Our generation had the unique position of growing up with the internet. As we first began to find our voices, define ourselves and finally venture out into the world, so too was the internet still finding its legs. Not many people even knew what to do with the internet, beyond knowing that they should have an e-mail address (so you can forward chain mail). We ran no risk of running into our parents on social networking sites. There was no worry of your employers seeing the post about your bad day at work. It was rare to even find your friends on-line. The internet was a refuge from all these things.
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It’s been years since I’ve done one of these. But they’re some of my favorite LiveJournal posts to look back on, so why not resume the tradition?
2012 was a busy year for me, and most of my leisure time was spent grinding in a panic to complete as much as possible in FFXIV before the servers went down. I missed a lot of things. Many of these I probably won’t get to for another year yet. As such, this is by no means a comprehensive, absolute best of the best list. Don’t jump down my throat because I didn’t list Assassin’s Creed III – I’m sure it was amazing! I bet that one book you keep telling me to read was great too. I just haven’t done it yet. These are some things I did get to, and happened to enjoy an awful lot.
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