Month: November 2021

The Wheel of Time, Episode 1: Leavetaking

This will contain spoilers. So many spoilers. It’s downright spoiled. If you haven’t watched the first episode of the Wheel of Time and read all of the books, beware!

I’m also assuming that you know basic terminology like Aes Sedai, Ajahs, etc.

I need images to build up a bit more spoiler space, so I’m going back through my old photos in chronological order for now. I may take some new pictures over the next weekend. This is Vesuvius from 2014.

First off, I wasn’t expecting to spend so much time with the kids from the Two Rivers. Things people said about the focus of the first episode being on Moiraine and being about the rebirth of the Dragon Reborn, I was expecting more New Spring and less Eye of the World in the first episode. And, instead, the New Spring-y stuff is limited to the first few minutes. Then we get Moiraine and Lan watching a bunch of sisters of the Red Ajah catching a man who can channel (was that Logain?) and when it turns out that he isn’t the Dragon Reborn, Moiraine leaves for the Two Rivers.

Rafe Judkins, creator of the television series, is attempting to obfuscate who the Dragon Reborn will turn out to be in part by saying that the Dragon Reborn can also be female and making Egwene or Nynaeve (or both?) ta’veren as well as the three boys, to which I say, “about damn time.”

There’s a lot I liked about Jordan’s attempts at egalitarianism. I liked the fact that so many of the countries of Randland have female rulers, for example. But as with everyone, Jordan had some blind spots. Channeling is stereotypical and, kind of kinky. Men are more powerful and they take an active role in channeling. Women are weaker and channel by surrendering to the Power. The balance for men being stronger is that women can join their abilities together, while for men, they can only join together if there’s a woman in their circle. See? Kinky.

In one big departure from the books, it seems clear to me that Nynaeve knows that “listening to the wind” is channeling. She doesn’t know who her parents are (which is odd. Where is that going?) and she was raised by the former Wisdom of Emond’s Field (a name that I don’t think I’ve heard in the series yet, so far they’ve just called it The Two Rivers), who could “listen to the wind” and went to Tar Valon to train to be an Aes Sedai and was refused because of her ragged clothes and her “peasant accent.”

As part of the attempt to make it uncertain who will be the Dragon Reborn, we also see way more than we do in the books. We see the ceremony where the Women’s Circle braid’s Egwene’s hair and we see the events of Winternight, rather than just seeing the destruction afterwards, which was nice. Well, watching the people of Emond’s Field be slaughtered by Trollocs wasn’t nice. But having those blank filled in was nice. Oh, you know what I mean. I think.

Now for the biggest, most spoilery, question, was Laila fridged? For those who have never heard the term “fridge” used that way, it’s based in a Green Lantern comic book featuring the stupidest Green Lantern of them all, Kyle Rayner. The villain Major Force kills Kyle’s girlfriend, Alexandra, and sticks her in the refrigerator. This leads Kyle to develop as a character. It has come to mean any time a female character is sacrificed (to death, or to incapacitation or whatever) to advance a man’s storyline.

Now, at first glance, Laila’s accidental death at Perrin’s hands (or axe, I guess) does look like fridging. Perrin will change and grow or otherwise develop (maybe in a maladjusted way) to this trauma. I hope that they find a way to subvert this trope in further episodes, but if that’s the only major problem I have with the show, then we’re doing pretty well.

Mega Spoiler for a book that won’t be adapted until season 3, I think, follows:

And what will happen when Perrin returns home with Faile after leaving town before Laila’s funeral? I suspect we may not have the happy Emond’s Field wedding of the book series.

The Goodreads Awards . . . Thingy

Goodreads Choice Awards! That’s the name!

Anyway, the first round of voting is open for 2021 and I might actually remember to participate this year!

I usually either miss it completely or just make it for the final round or have been too busy catching up on old books to actually have read any of the books up for voting.

For example, in 2020, I’d read a whole four of the books that were in the running. Two of them — Mexican Gothic, by Silvia Moreno-Garcia and The Tower of Nero, by Rick Riordan — won in their categories.

In 2019, I’d read one of the nominees — The Tyrant’s Tomb, by Rick Riordan.

This year, thanks to the Fantastic Strangelings Book Club, I’ve read five, count them, five, of the nominees in Fantasy. I had to make a decision for probably the first time in the history of the Goodreads Choice Awards. I’m really impressed with myself, even though I had the help of Jenny Lawson in achieving this goal.

The second round starts November 30. Let’s see if I remember to vote in that one.

Disney’s Dinosaur (2000)

This will probably be a short post, but at least I’m writing, right?

One of the weirder arguments that Thomas and I had in our marriage was about Dinosaur. Thomas was very into computer animation (so much so that he considered going to school for it) and so we were very much looking forward to the movie.

And the movie was beautiful to look at. The dinosaurs, the backgrounds, the way the animators integrated the water into the scenery (my understanding was it was easier to just patch in images of water than to get computers to do the math for animating water back in those days).

Unfortunately, all of that gorgeous animation was tied to that story.

Okay. So the movie starts with this quote: “Some things start out big, and some things start out small, very small. But sometimes the smallest thing can make the biggest changes of all.”

And what follows is an iganodon baby, Aladar, being raised by lemurs and then going back to what I assume must have been the African mainland (since lemurs only occur on Madagascar) and leading a motley group of dinosaurs from an area that has been struck by drought and famine to the “nesting grounds” a valley with plenty of food and water, being pursued by carnotaurs the whole way.

We’ll just leave out the natural history aspects, such as that there were millions of years between the iguanodon and the lemur and focus on the ending.

The “nesting grounds” are, as I said before, a valley apparently hemmed in on all sides by mountains. From what we can see, there is only one entrance/exit from the valley. The other exit is blocked by rocks. So, they’re safe from the carnotaurs while in there, but can they leave? I even seem to recall that they blocked the existing exit to protect themselves from the carnotaurs.

While I know that the “biggest change” is that Aladar convinced the other dinosaurs to cooperate, something that he learned from his lemur parents. If he hadn’t convinced them to cooperate, they would have been eaten by the carnotaurs or starved on the way to the nesting grounds.

And that’s great, but the reason that Aladar and his lemur family returned to the mainland is because of a meteor strike. I mean, a meteor strike? Like, the kind that killed the dinosaurs?

So . . . the main characters are going to end up in that lovely valley in Africa during the years’ long winter that was the proximate cause of the deaths of the dinosaurs?

I was left with too many questions and too much doom to just go, “Wow, that was beautiful animation!” and leave it at that. Thomas was very much able to do that and he seemed upset with me for “harshing his buzz,” as it were. I did my best to keep my mouth shut, but it still leaked out occasionally.

For today’s Gratuitous Amazon Link, we’ll do another Percy Jackson and the Olympians book, this time The Titan’s Curse.

I Need to Get Back to Knitting

Or crocheting or embroidery or something. The Wheel of Time series is starting in less than a week and I always used to knit or crochet in front of the television.

I have a bunch of projects that I’ve started and that I haven’t touched in ages. I started a sweater for Mila from Seamless Knits for Posh Pups that I need to get back to, particularly since it’s starting to get nippy and I want to take her out walking in the autumn weather.

I’ve bought some glass beads towards making a weighted blanket, but the yarn I wanted to thread it onto (the yarn from the blanket that I’m unraveling) is just a little too thick. I was going to make that blanket a gigantic mitered square, but I now have another blanket that’s falling apart, so I think I’ll use a slightly smaller needle and make a big square from the center out. Unraveling those blankets will take quite a while and I want to wait until it’s colder to go back to that project.

I was thinking about making a sort of string bag out of black crocheting cotton and fishing line. I haven’t decided whether I’m going to knit or crochet it, though.

I’ve been trying to get to the dog sweater pattern book that I have on Amazon, but my typing fingers have been a pain today. You’ll know by the time you get down here if I’ve been able to get to it, since it’ll be today’s Germane Amazon Link, but I figured I’d point out how frustrating it has been.

Pikmin Bloom

I’ve been playing Pikmin Bloom for . . . a week now? And it’s something to do, but I’m afraid I don’t get it.

It took me pretty much a week to figure out Pokemon Go and way less time to figure out Wizards Unite, since the activities in Wizards Unite pretty much map 1-to-1 to Pokemon Go. You walk, you catch Pokemon/return Foundables. You can use berries and make better throws to make it easier to catch Pokemon. You can use potions and make better traces to make it easier to return Foundables. You can get balls and other supplies from Pokestops. You can get spell energy from inns and potion ingredients from greenhouses. And so on and so on.

In Pikmin Bloom, it seems that you walk with a troop of Pikmin (plant-like critters), but you don’t pick up the supplies and Pikmin sprouts that are on the map yourself, you have to have your Pikmin do it for you?

I accidentally got a postcard and I sent it to one of my two Pikmin Bloom friends. The one that’s not Evelyn. I figured that I’d figure it out and send a card to Evelyn pretty soon. It’s been days and I haven’t been able to figure it out, so Evelyn is still going postcardless.

I’ve kind of read at some articles on the game, but it’s just not gelling.

So I am supposed to meet Evelyn tomorrow evening (November 13). I’ll try to get out earlier than that and go downtown and noodle around with this game and figure out if there’s a way to reliably get postcards, whether I can actually pick up fruit myself, and what I’m supposed to do with those giant flowers in the game.

Update: I still don’t have any postcards to send after playing off and on (mostly on) for five hours. I did find a lot of open flowers, though. Today was the first Pikmin Bloom Community Day, and the only goal was to walk 10,000 steps. The notification on my phone said until 8:00. Okay, it actually said “hasta . . . 20:00, hora local,” and no matter how I add it up, that’s 8:00 pm. Everything else I can find says that it ended at 6:00. I did make my 10,000 steps by 8:00, though, so let’s see if I get my badge or not.

ETA (11/17/21):

  1. I haven’t seen the badge for Community Day yet. I suspect I can just give up on that. I guess the event did end at 6:00.
  2. I’ve figured out a way to pretty predictably get postcards. Defeat a mushroom.
  3. I can hear you now, “A mushroom?” And, yes, a mushroom. Mushrooms are to Pikmin Bloom what gym battles are to Pokemon Go. They appear at certain times at Pokestop and gym locations and you can send X number of your Pikmin to tear down the mushroom. So far, every time my Pikmin have defeated a mushroom, they’ve gotten two pieces of fruit and a postcard.

My Favorite Wheel of Time Character The Wheel of Time, a Primer, Part 1

I was going to write about my favorite character, but I kept going back to the beginning and explaining the terms I was using in that post. So I guess I have to start with the most basic of basics. The Aes Sedai (the official organization for female channelers in the Wheel of Time books) —

Okay. More basic than that. The Wheel in the Wheel of Time is driven by a power known as the One Power*. Some people have the ability to use the One Power, an activity known as “channeling.” Ones who channel are “channelers.”

As the book opens, the only channelers who are allowed to channel —

Crap. This is turning into a different post than the one I intended to write. So let’s retitle this “The Wheel of Time, a Primer, Part 1” and start from there.

3,000 years before the Wheel of Time starts, the Aes Sedai were a coeducational group with both male and female channelers. Their symbol was the Taiji (known commonly as the “yin yang” symbol). The white half was for the female channelers and the black half for the male.

This is because the One Power doesn’t come from the same place for male and female channelers. In one of the things that irks me the most about this series, it’s a stereotype of male/female sexual relations. The male half is active and the female half is passive. Now, I’m Ace, but I’ve read enough to know that sex is, in fact, more complicated than that.

Then the male channelers, led by Lews Therin Telamon (a/k/a “The Dragon”) did . . .something in an attempt to destroy the Dark One and the Dark One struck back and tainted the male half of the Source, causing the male channelers to “go mad” (sic) and break the world.

Like, physically break the world. People had to leave their homes because some places that had been dry land became the ocean, or vice versa. Mountains cropped up where none had been before and mountains that had been there disappeared without a trace.

To give you a frame of reference, Jordan said that his hometown of Charleston, South Carolina would eventually be the area whence our protagonists hale — the Two Rivers. The Two Rivers is on the western half of the continent in the Wheel of Time. Kind of like where, I don’t know, Nevada? Utah? Colorado? is in the United States in our world. So most of what is now the United States is under the Aryth Ocean.

Once the land stopped heaving and oceans stopped flowing around and things, they discovered that this taint was still there, and every man who learned how to channel eventually succumbed to mental illness. So, the female Aes Sedai set out to find all of the men who can channel and cut them off from that ability before they can succumb.

This is where the Ajahs come in. 3,000 years ago, ajahs were temporary alliances to achieve a goal. Jordan doesn’t really go into what that entailed, that I can find, but I’m imagining an ajah forming to maybe rescue victims of a genocide scheme, or construct a large structure or whatever.

The biggest and best of these projects were created by men and women working together. Which is, of course, no longer an option.

At some point in the intervening 3,000 years, the female Aes Sedai separated into permanent groups based on their interests and skills. They also used the name “Ajah” to refer to these groups. The largest group of them dedicated themselves to finding and “gentling” men who can channel. This is the Red Ajah.

The other Ajahs are:

Yellow, who have talent and interest in healing and medicine;

Green, who train and wait and hold themselves ready for The Dragon to return and fight the Last Battle against the Dark One;

Blue, who dedicate themselves to “causes of honor and justice”;

White, who value logic above all else;

Gray, who value diplomacy and politics; and, last but never least,

Brown, who are dedicated to study and research.

And I’m, like, a whole Ajah of bookworms? Sign me right the heck up for that!

I mean, as a paralegal, I did kind of toy with the Gray for a while, but really there was no actual contest.

Oh, and there are rumors of a Black Ajah dedicated to serving the Dark One, but that could never happen, right?

*Things that happen later in the series have me believing that the One Power is electricity.

Back to Cleaning?

I’ve been having a heck of a time with writer’s block lately. This is hilarious because the whole point of NaNoWriMo is to teach yourself to just write. Well, I’m 11 days in and that’s not happening.


So I’m considering procrastinating a bit on writing and maybe doing some thinking about writing while I do it by working on decluttering my closet, cleaning the floors, bleaching my shower, etc.

So. I just hauled my current bag of old clothes out to my car, found most of the pants that I’m planning to cut into strips and macrame into a bag or something.

My weight is doing weird things right now. I’m exercising and watching what I eat and so forth, but I seem to be actually putting on weight? One of the dresses that I am jettisoning was too loose on me once upon a time and now it’s too tight. I don’t even know.

I cleaned out my car a bit and then did a little cleaning in the kitchen. Meanwhile, I’ve decided to write a very, very spoilery Wheel of Time post about my favorite character, who has just made her first appearance in my current reread.

I’ll need a good photo to use as spoiler space, though.

Maybe I’ll even put a cut on this post so that someone just glancing down my home page won’t get spoiled. Because, argh! It’s just. So good.

Gratuitous Amazon Link time. Today we have the second in the Percy Jackson and the Olympians series by Rick Riordan, The Sea of Monsters. This may well be my favorite book in the series. I mean, Percy, Annabeth, Tyson, Grover. What’s not to love?

Now if only I could find my copy of The Lightning Thief. Grrr.

Content Creators: Yes Theory

Wow. I’m trying to remember in what order I discovered the various YouTube channels that I visit. I’m pretty sure that Yes Theory came behind Try Guys.

The origins of Yes Theory are both long and short. The Reader’s Digest Condensed version is that Thomas Brag and Matt Dajer attended McGill University in Montreal at the same time. They attended a party where they met the only person to ever be given permission to climb the Great Pyramid of Giza, Ammar Kandil. The three hit it off immediately and, with a friend acting as cameraman, they decided to try one new thing every day for thirty days. They called this “Project Thirty.”

In Project Thirty, they did things like give flowers to strangers, try to get strangers to dance with them in public, and so on. The videos are a lot of fun.

Then, in 2016, they got an offer to move to Venice, California and film videos there for a company called Vertical. During the early days of their time in California they all lived together in one house and also let friends live in that house with them.

I didn’t discover Yes Theory until the last year or so, so I went back through the posts and got caught up-to-date. I really enjoyed this era of videos, even though a number of their videos during this era are, erm, I’m not sure how to describe them. Their videos are very pro-social, about cooperating and making friends, and learning, and travel.

In the middle stretch of their channel, they made a number of videos seeing what they could get away with — trying to convince people in Beverly Hills to let them swim in their pools, sneaking into movie premieres, etc. They also had a series whenever they traveled of one of the guys having to find strangers who would feed and house them in a strange city.

This group of three guys who met at a party are now hoping to to lead a sort of revolution encouraging people to “Seek Discomfort.” As they put it, “We believe life’s greatest moments and deepest connections exist outside of your comfort zone.”

Matt is no longer making videos and Ammar only shows up occasionally, so they’ve added Matt’s younger brother, also named Thomas (he goes by Tommy in the videos) and a friend named Eric Tabach.

Today’s Gratuitous Amazon Link for today is Princess Academy: Palace of Stone by Shannon Hale. In this sequel to Princess Academy, Miri and the other girls from the academy come to the capital of Danland, Asland, to help Britta prepare for her wedding. Miri also gets a chance to attend the institution of higher learning for Danland — the Queen’s Castle.

Foreshadowing and Prophecies

This contains spoilers for The Wheel of Time and The Scholomance (or at least the first two Scholomance books, since the third hasn’t come out yet). I think the spoilers are fairly mild, but still, if you’re like me and want to go into things unspoiled, you might want to read something else for now.

In books, television shows, etc., there’s almost always some form of foreshadowing and, in the kind of books, television shows, etc, that I like, there’s a good chance that there’ll be at least one prophecy.

Like, one of my favorite television shows in recent years was Gravity Falls (OMG. So good!). In Gravity Falls, twins Dipper and Mabel Pines are sent to stay with their Grunkle Stan for the summer. Dipper finds a book with a handprint and the number 3 on the cover. Soon, Dipper is noticing all sorts of weird things about Gravity Falls and he wants to get to the bottom of it. Meanwhile, Mabel is willing to help Dipper, but mostly she just wants to have fun. Alex Hirsch, the creator, foreshadowed things and dropped clues, and so on. When a group of the fans started poring through the series, Hirsch is quoted as saying that he created an army of Dippers.

I’m a Mabel. I’m along for the ride, just having fun. Sometimes I’ll catch a line that sticks out to me, but like as not, I won’t actually say, “Wow. This will be important later.”

This is not to say that I don’t have fun on rereads finding the foreshadowing. But for my first reading/watching, I like finding out things as the author intends to reveal them.

Strangely, though, I tend to worry at prophecies like a terrier with a rat.

In the Wheel of Time series, it is predicted that Rand will “break the world again,” and everyone’s terrified of what he will do, etc., but after people have been fleeing their homelands and settling elsewhere, someone is all, “Rand will break the world,” and I’m, “dude, he already is breaking the world.”

The exact words of the prophecy are “and he shall break the world again by his coming, tearing apart all ties that bind.” I mean, people leaving their homes and moving to new places and putting down roots there? The characters are clearly expecting a physical breaking, but the breaking that Rand brings is more of an interpersonal breaking.

This is brought on by my recent read of The Last Graduate, by Naomi Novik. In the Scholomance series, we find that our protagonist, El, is the subject of a prophecy in which El is supposed to “destroy” the enclaves of the wizards. I think I know how she’s going to do it, and I can’t wait to find out if I’m right.

A New Chapter in my Attempt to Dictate Entries

Well, I have finally given up and signed up for a for pay software dictation software.

None of the free software I’ve tried was a damn bit of good, so I downloaded Dragon Anywhere.

Hopefully, this will be a worthwhile thing. I have just signed up for a one week free trial, just to see if this is any good.

Next up, is to see if the wireless headset I use works.

Now that I have this new set up, I up completely out of ideas about what to write about. Hopefully this writer’s block will end soon.

Next question is whether I can transfer this over to WordPress.

Apparently the wireless headset does not work because when I do not have the phone to my mouth it only picks up a few words. Good to know. Now the next question. Can I walk with this? So far I’ve made it about half a block from my house and it’s still working. It’s night, and I’m looking around looking over the phone to be able to see what I’m doing.

Theoretically, I should be able to use the wireless headset. But it isn’t working for some reason. I mean, if you can make phone calls on it, shouldn’t you be able to dictate with it? I will have to futz around with it to see what’s going on with that.

I found a button that claims to copy everything to the clipboard. I am not sure if it’s going to take everything, and I don’t know if it’s going to put everything in the other paragraphs in the correct order, but let’s give it a try. No, I realized that I need to download the WordPress app to my phone so that I can just copy and paste.

There is a pair of ladies walking along behind me talking and I don’t know if this is going to pick up what they’re saying or not I think it might be this could be an issue.

They continued to go straight and I just turned that he will be okay if. If this is able to pick up other conversations, that may be an issue on some of my walks, because I do like to walk, like, on the Riverwalk where there are usually a lot of people.

I just installed WordPress on my phone, and my phone says I’m out of memory. So, it looks like I’m going to be cleaning up the memory of my phone for a while. Wish me luck.

I did it! I’m editing this post on my desktop computer after moving it from Dragon to the WordPress app.