Unsurprising. Sepsis is missed quite a lot, I believe.
I REALLY admire her for emphasising this dreadful fuck up was nothing to do with evil Tories, austerity, Brexit, NHS cuts, whatever
It is the real and mediocre NHS, prone to unaccountable errors, which deep down we all know, despite the worship
I was particularly struck be those words: don't get ill at weekends. Completely true. A relative of mine with cystic fibrosis nearly died in a Cornish hospital on a weekend. We were told that if it had been a weekday, he'd have been fine
That is not good enough
Every medical system has similar anecdotes, sadly. Mistakes will happen, especially with complicated conditions.
But lessons must be learned from mistakes, and to be seen to be learned. When the wagons are circled and no criticism of the institution and its people is allowed. This reached a nadir at Stafford (*), when anyone even trying to talk about what was going on was rounded on by not only the trust and its staff, but sh*t-for-brains people who could not stand to see the NHS getting criticised.
And then there's Burnham's role in all of that.
(*) A family member witnessed this first-hand, fortunately with no long-term consequences.
That's why I said "mediocre" not "terrible". The NHS is mediocre: an OKish mid-ranking health system, with quite a few problems beyond "cuts" or "austeity". One of those problems is the way we are told to worship it, and protect it from criticism. So this brave, grieving mother has done us all a service
I think the politicisation of the NHS (both pro and con) has a lot to answer for - when something goes wrong, people who dislike the system say see, it's the mediocre NHS, we need a better system, and people who like the system say no, no, the system's wonderful, except for that time. We should neither worship it nor treat every mistake as a sign of system failure - rather, except in egregious cases of wilful negligence, learn from every mistake frankly without trying to fire everyone involved. I suspect one could say the same of every medical system on the planet (and indeed organisations generally, but as the article says, we do still take doctors' opinions too uncritically in a way that we wouldn't with , say, builders or economists).
Whether it's the best way to organise health care (IMJO yes) and whether, if we choose it, the Government funds it adequately (IMO currently hell no), are two separate issues, and as the article says they don't relate to this particular tragedy.
Indeed there was certainly poor care, but worth noting that this child's potentially avoidable death occurred at a national specialist unit as good as any in the world, but all systems relying on humans can fail, and doctors are human.
Worth noting that plenty of second opinions were sought, but as so often the problem seems to have been communication between the team, and with other parts of the hospital such as PICU.
The junior staff seem under experienced and undersupervised, and afraid of communicating with the seniors. Similar issues have been behind many recent obstetric scandals. These are not unique problems to the NHS, and happen worldwide.
It's well over a decade back now, but I had a similar experience when my father got sepsis in hospital.
I got the very strong impression that if we hadn't pestered the fuck out of the doctors for several days, we wouldn't have got the second consultant's opinion which led to his pulling through.
Certainly important to be assertive in asking for such things, but medicine is a team approach and in a well functioning team the juniors and nurses should feel empowered to identify and flag up any issues with a deteriorating patient, after all they are in more regular contact.
I always thank the nurses or junior doctors when they raise concerns, and take them seriously. I am not immune to making mistakes and pleased to have them picked up before they become catastrophes. Not all my colleagues take the same approach to being contacted.
What you say is absolutely correct - and from your previous comments your place seems to be pretty well functioning.
It's very apparent from numerous stories, and my own anecdotal experience, that is far from universal. FWIW, I've recent experience of two hospitals locally. One is good; the other quite the opposite* (which is where my father's story took place).
The surprising thing about the Guardian story is that it happened in a centre of excellence. Which takes us back to your comments.
*Note even the bad places can have some excellent professionals working in them.
Looks like HMS Broken Propeller is under tow, with three tugs helping it east. If it's heading towards Rosyth is going to take at least five days to make it there at the speed they're going.
It looks like they've turned the tracking off on the carrier itself, no update for two hours from its anchored position on the marine traffic app, but you can see the tugs.
Possible Mercedes pole there before the yellow flag.
Yep. Indycar have instituted a new rule this year, that you go to the back if you cause a flag in qualifying that impedes the lap of others. Seems a sensible way to do things.
Possibly. It does leave a slightly sour taste when a driver gets pole thanks to his team mate's mistake impeding the rest.
I'd like to say we're all feeling @Dura_Ace's pain currently - I'm not sure.
On other things, the pro-Johnson elements were out in force on the front page of the Mail - clear the soon to be former Prime Minister so he can wait in the wings for a return. Mu thought on that is he still has to get through the COVID public enquiry which may well ask him some awkward questions.
Now, for simple old @stodge to offer some thoughts - let's say the monthly energy bill at Stodge Towers is £150 but Mrs Stodge hears from our energy supplier it's going up to £300. I opine "that nice Mrs Truss and that nice Mr Kwarteng will help out - they'll either give us £150 to cover the bill or pay £150 to the energy supplier to cover the bill, either way we won't be out of pocket."
Hang on, though, that £300 worth of gas still exists - I've paid half of it but the supplier bought the rest and has to pay someone for it. All we are doing is financial buckpassing so the Stodges don't have to pay, well, not directly anyway. If the Government pays, how are they going to cover all these £150? Perhaps Kwarteng will borrow more to top up the £100 billion we're already going to have to pay in debt management next year.
A windfall tax seems superficially attractive but somebody still had to buy the energy at the higher price. If you're an energy supplier, you need energy to supply and you pay what you need to pay. If you buy £300 worth of energy and get only £150 from the customer and then get a windfall tax I'm just puzzled as to where that leaves the supply industry.
Well, ultimately all gas importers have to reduce their consumption.
One of the things that people really misunderstand, is that they think "those Germans get all their gas from Russia, they're going to get fucked, while us Brits who don't are going to be fine."
Unless you have gas on long-term supply contracts (and most UK gas is not on long-term supply contracts), then you are going to be paying the world market price for that gas. And that world market price is suddenly going to be driven by the Germans bidding on every LNG cargo out there.
Worldwide, the only people who aren't seeing surging gas prices are those people who have domestic gas production, but no way to export it. And that's a pretty small list of countries. (And, by the way, it also misses something else: if your energy is cheap, and other peoples' energy is expensive, then suddenly lots of energy intensive activities will take place in your country, driving up the price of power. Think steel mini mills and aluminium smelters.)
Basically: when you remove a large chunk of gas supply, pretty much everybody has to cut back usage.
And that's why subsidies alone aren't the solution. We can't all subsidise ourselves out of trouble, because those subsidies don't magic gas into existence.
Remember when I said, all those hours ago, that AI will make the scariest horror movies EVER?
Here is an exceptionally early glimpse of what the machines might do. Like a scene from the worst nightmare in your worst nightmare. So deep in uncanny valley it is possibly emerging the other side of Planet Freak-out
People selling dalle and midjourney prompts for 2 to 5 dollars a pop
Which is insane, given that Stable Diffusion costs 1p a go and, as far as I can see, is just as good at most of this
Nope that's not the dalle charge, it's extra. What he does is exhibit results like your ghost children and say if you pay me 2 bucks I will disclose to you the prompt which created this. You then go off and put it into dalle.
Yes I understood that wasn't theDalle charge. But I didn't realise this guy was selling the prompts. Next time I will read a linked article before commenting...
But that's clever. Prompt selling. Makes total sense. Some people have good promptcraft, some don't. It is quite a peculiar thing. I have now discovered a bunch of prompt words which nearly always give you interesting, powerful results
They tend to be quite but not wholly unusual. I am making a list
AI has no imagination and it will "learn" from what prompt words people seem to like the results of and for which they keep instructing tweaked and retweaked images. Then when the same words get typed in again it will cut out the middle stages and try to appear highly intelligent, if giving the punters what they want is "intelligence". In short: it's a cool toy.
Naive reductionism at its worst. No attempt to define imagination or intelligence, which might make you think about the question:can we be sure a successful human artist is doing anything different?
Do you dispute that being a top level human go or chess player requires intelligence and imagination? Because if you do you are wrong. so either computers have the requisite intell and imag, or they can get by without and still win. If they can outperform the best go players why can they nor outperform the best painters?
For some reason I find it harder to conceive of a machine being able to the replicate the confusion of the human mind rather than its high performing clarity.
Doing a great painting? Yep. Writing a banger of a song? Yep. Playing near flawless chess? Yep.
But sitting there trying and failing to make sense of things, getting distracted, losing your thread, seeing connections that aren't there, struggling to separate genuine emotions from fake ones, going mad, wising up, tuning out, etc etc ... I struggle to imagine a machine doing this.
To take it a step further I struggle to imagine a machine struggling to imagine a machine doing this. (that's enough fucking imagining & struggling-ed)
Yep. And sorry (cos you're right it sooner or later, and usually sooner, leads up fundament alley) but just one more for the road -
I can't get my mind around a machine failing to get its mind around things in the same way that I can't.
To move things away from fundament alley, I feel (no doubt displaying prejudices and subjectivity that will be leapt upon) that the whole AI artists thing seems to miss the aspect of struggle in art, the self doubt battling with massive ego, the fear of failure and ridicule, the obsessiveness verging at times on madness, the moments of alchemical transformation in even a small passage of painting, or drawing, or whatever. It's not the whole story of course but a lot of great art has been forged out of those things.
And great science too - as the Imperial grad said to the Arts School grad.
It is the suppliers who are making serious profits here and more than half of these are beyond the reach of the UK taxpayer. We need to have a brief think before deciding whether or not penalising those that are not is the best way to encourage new investment here. Doesn't take too long does it?
The focus on the distributors rather ignores the fact that the vast majority of them went bust this year and the remaining ones are being asked to pick up the tab for them, something they really cannot afford to do without going bust themselves. Basically, it is a really stupid idea. Indeed, that doesn't really go far enough. Any politician floating this as the answer to anything can safely be ignored as having nothing useful to contribute. Which sadly rules out the vast majority.
Inasmuch as we now have an effective cartel monopolising UK energy supply we can argue the market has done what it so often does - the weak ultimately go to the wall and the strong inherit. The big four or five suppliers have us all by the thermostats and that's a situation needing addressing another day.
As for the wider picture, if the aim is to neuter energy as a source of income for Russia, rather like mask wearing, it's only really effective if everyone does it. Neither China nor India (it seems all Johnson's attempts to woo Modi have been less than successful) seem willing to join the embargo on Russian oil and gas and if they continue to put foreign currency into the Kremlin that will enable the war in Ukraine to continue.
As someone else said the other day, the big winners from all this are America and China and the big losers are Europe.
Aside from filling Putin's coffers, isn't it better for our domestic energy price/supply situation that China and India continue to buy Russian fossil fuels? Otherwise they would also be bidding for the same non-Russian supplies we need and there isn't enough of already.
Looks like HMS Broken Propeller is under tow, with three tugs helping it east. If it's heading towards Rosyth is going to take at least five days to make it there at the speed they're going.
I saw it on its brief voyage last week, under its own power.
Unsurprising. Sepsis is missed quite a lot, I believe.
I REALLY admire her for emphasising this dreadful fuck up was nothing to do with evil Tories, austerity, Brexit, NHS cuts, whatever
It is the real and mediocre NHS, prone to unaccountable errors, which deep down we all know, despite the worship
I was particularly struck be those words: don't get ill at weekends. Completely true. A relative of mine with cystic fibrosis nearly died in a Cornish hospital on a weekend. We were told that if it had been a weekday, he'd have been fine
That is not good enough
Every medical system has similar anecdotes, sadly. Mistakes will happen, especially with complicated conditions.
But lessons must be learned from mistakes, and to be seen to be learned. When the wagons are circled and no criticism of the institution and its people is allowed. This reached a nadir at Stafford (*), when anyone even trying to talk about what was going on was rounded on by not only the trust and its staff, but sh*t-for-brains people who could not stand to see the NHS getting criticised.
And then there's Burnham's role in all of that.
(*) A family member witnessed this first-hand, fortunately with no long-term consequences.
That's why I said "mediocre" not "terrible". The NHS is mediocre: an OKish mid-ranking health system, with quite a few problems beyond "cuts" or "austeity". One of those problems is the way we are told to worship it, and protect it from criticism. So this brave, grieving mother has done us all a service
I think the politicisation of the NHS (both pro and con) has a lot to answer for - when something goes wrong, people who dislike the system say see, it's the mediocre NHS, we need a better system, and people who like the system say no, no, the system's wonderful, except for that time. We should neither worship it nor treat every mistake as a sign of system failure - rather, except in egregious cases of wilful negligence, learn from every mistake frankly without trying to fire everyone involved. I suspect one could say the same of every medical system on the planet (and indeed organisations generally, but as the article says, we do still take doctors' opinions too uncritically in a way that we wouldn't with , say, builders or economists).
Whether it's the best way to organise health care (IMJO yes) and whether, if we choose it, the Government funds it adequately (IMO currently hell no), are two separate issues, and as the article says they don't relate to this particular tragedy.
Indeed there was certainly poor care, but worth noting that this child's potentially avoidable death occurred at a national specialist unit as good as any in the world, but all systems relying on humans can fail, and doctors are human.
Worth noting that plenty of second opinions were sought, but as so often the problem seems to have been communication between the team, and with other parts of the hospital such as PICU.
The junior staff seem under experienced and undersupervised, and afraid of communicating with the seniors. Similar issues have been behind many recent obstetric scandals. These are not unique problems to the NHS, and happen worldwide.
It's well over a decade back now, but I had a similar experience when my father got sepsis in hospital.
I got the very strong impression that if we hadn't pestered the fuck out of the doctors for several days, we wouldn't have got the second consultant's opinion which led to his pulling through.
Certainly important to be assertive in asking for such things, but medicine is a team approach and in a well functioning team the juniors and nurses should feel empowered to identify and flag up any issues with a deteriorating patient, after all they are in more regular contact.
I always thank the nurses or junior doctors when they raise concerns, and take them seriously. I am not immune to making mistakes and pleased to have them picked up before they become catastrophes. Not all my colleagues take the same approach to being contacted.
What you say is absolutely correct - and from your previous comments your place seems to be pretty well functioning.
It's very apparent from numerous stories, and my own anecdotal experience, that is far from universal. FWIW, I've recent experience of two hospitals locally. One is good; the other quite the opposite* (which is where my father's story took place).
The surprising thing about the Guardian story is that it happened in a centre of excellence. Which takes us back to your comments.
*Note even the bad places can have some excellent professionals working in them.
The patchiness is more localised than that. One subspecialty can be a nightmare and another world class in neighbouring wards.
Patchiness isn't unique to Britain, of course and by many anecdotes is often worse in private healthcare systems. The collaborative way of working in the NHS is both a drag on innovation and an early warning sign of poor practice. In private systems specialists are often reluctant to refer on complications as it effects their own reputation.
Not all that knowledge gets acted on though. It is often difficult for the Medical Directors team to get robust enough evidence to take a case forward.
Andrew Weissmann 🌻 @AWeissmann_ · 2h Breaking: Opening statement at FLA hearing by Trump counsel abandons defense that docs were all planted, admitting that case is largely about govt papers in Trump’s possession.
These guys are volunteers and know what they are doing. Mountains need to be taken seriously.
Absolutely nothing to do with taking mountains seriously, and someone involved hasn't a fucking clue what they are doing because you NEVER rely on just the one method of position fixing if you can possibly help it whether its what 3 words or grid ref or anything else, you say thanks for that, and where actually are you/what's near you? A grid reference has MUCH more scope for errors and ambiguities, like orders of magnitude more. This is not a point about what3words at all, it's about desirableredundancy.
OT but interesting (if with some inadvertent Saturday pm light relief in the way of the Graun's Scottish expertise, and their idea of the contents of Meg Dods' Cookbook).
'The project’s lead, Dr Alberto Fiore, a professor of food chemistry and technology at Abertay University in Dundee, said Zimbabweans rely heavily on maize, which is low in protein, essential minerals, amino acids and fatty acids. [...]
Although unwilling to disclose his recipe before the publication of the study’s data, Fiore did say his insect-based porridge contained grains including sorghum and millets. He said he was sure the dish was palatable, with his research team having conducted consumer taste tests in Scotland, a country long associated with porridge.'
These guys are volunteers and know what they are doing. Mountains need to be taken seriously.
Absolutely nothing to do with taking mountains seriously, and someone involved hasn't a fucking clue what they are doing because you NEVER rely on just the one method of position fixing if you can possibly help it whether its what 3 words or grid ref or anything else, you say thanks for that, and where actually are you/what's near you? A grid reference has MUCH more scope for errors and ambiguities, like orders of magnitude more. This is not a point about what3words at all, it's about desirableredundancy.
They do say they like both! - description, and NGR.
These guys are volunteers and know what they are doing. Mountains need to be taken seriously.
Hmm! Glad to see they like best a map and OS reference. Despite the collective wisdom of much of PB.
Christ, not this again.
hedgehog.pig.toad is susceptible to about 10 errors (plurals, big for pig, towed). gridref 342546 is susceptible to 900,000 errors because no combination of 6 digits is "not a real number." It is not controversial which is the better way of communicating a position. If Keswick Mountain Rescue Team are too thick to recognise this I must remember not to get lost in Keswick.
FPT: I was never a big fan of Barbara Ehrenreich, haven't even looked at "Nickled and Dimed", but I did once see an insightful observation from her: In the article I read, she argued that, in the US, innovations in the 1950's made it far easier for a man who wasn't wealthy to live without the support of a mother or a wife. Or at least the support that came from living in a boarding house*. Fast foods, easy care clothes, inexpensive vacuum cleaners, and TV dinners are the examples that come to my mind, but you can probably think of others.
And you can probably think of many likely consequences of that greater independence for single men.
(*In the first decades of the US Congress, most members lived in boarding houses. Those who lived together tended to vote together.)
Remember when I said, all those hours ago, that AI will make the scariest horror movies EVER?
Here is an exceptionally early glimpse of what the machines might do. Like a scene from the worst nightmare in your worst nightmare. So deep in uncanny valley it is possibly emerging the other side of Planet Freak-out
People selling dalle and midjourney prompts for 2 to 5 dollars a pop
Which is insane, given that Stable Diffusion costs 1p a go and, as far as I can see, is just as good at most of this
Nope that's not the dalle charge, it's extra. What he does is exhibit results like your ghost children and say if you pay me 2 bucks I will disclose to you the prompt which created this. You then go off and put it into dalle.
Yes I understood that wasn't theDalle charge. But I didn't realise this guy was selling the prompts. Next time I will read a linked article before commenting...
But that's clever. Prompt selling. Makes total sense. Some people have good promptcraft, some don't. It is quite a peculiar thing. I have now discovered a bunch of prompt words which nearly always give you interesting, powerful results
They tend to be quite but not wholly unusual. I am making a list
AI has no imagination and it will "learn" from what prompt words people seem to like the results of and for which they keep instructing tweaked and retweaked images. Then when the same words get typed in again it will cut out the middle stages and try to appear highly intelligent, if giving the punters what they want is "intelligence". In short: it's a cool toy.
Naive reductionism at its worst. No attempt to define imagination or intelligence, which might make you think about the question:can we be sure a successful human artist is doing anything different?
Do you dispute that being a top level human go or chess player requires intelligence and imagination? Because if you do you are wrong. so either computers have the requisite intell and imag, or they can get by without and still win. If they can outperform the best go players why can they nor outperform the best painters?
For some reason I find it harder to conceive of a machine being able to the replicate the confusion of the human mind rather than its high performing clarity.
Doing a great painting? Yep. Writing a banger of a song? Yep. Playing near flawless chess? Yep.
But sitting there trying and failing to make sense of things, getting distracted, losing your thread, seeing connections that aren't there, struggling to separate genuine emotions from fake ones, going mad, wising up, tuning out, etc etc ... I struggle to imagine a machine doing this.
To take it a step further I struggle to imagine a machine struggling to imagine a machine doing this. (that's enough fucking imagining & struggling-ed)
Yep. And sorry (cos you're right it sooner or later, and usually sooner, leads up fundament alley) but just one more for the road -
I can't get my mind around a machine failing to get its mind around things in the same way that I can't.
To move things away from fundament alley, I feel (no doubt displaying prejudices and subjectivity that will be leapt upon) that the whole AI artists thing seems to miss the aspect of struggle in art, the self doubt battling with massive ego, the fear of failure and ridicule, the obsessiveness verging at times on madness, the moments of alchemical transformation in even a small passage of painting, or drawing, or whatever. It's not the whole story of course but a lot of great art has been forged out of those things.
These guys are volunteers and know what they are doing. Mountains need to be taken seriously.
Hmm! Glad to see they like best a map and OS reference. Despite the collective wisdom of much of PB.
Christ, not this again.
hedgehog.pig.toad is susceptible to about 10 errors (plurals, big for pig, towed). gridref 342546 is susceptible to 900,000 errors because no combination of 6 digits is "not a real number." It is not controversial which is the better way of communicating a position. If Keswick Mountain Rescue Team are too thick to recognise this I must remember not to get lost in Keswick.
For me, the biggest issue with w3w is that it is a private system and privately owned. Unlike (say) the OSGB grid, if I want to use their API or convert references to lat/long, I need to pay for a licence.
Which is fine as it is a private company, but I'd be slightly nervous about getting all our emergency services used to using it, only to find the licence fee has gone up, or starts being applied to them. They also have access to all the locations you look up.
Jesus Christ this short Truss administration is going to be an absolute sh*tshow. Even Johnson sort of knew not to give Rees-Mogg too much power, but it appears he has enough as it it.
This is a nothing story.
Seems like VisitBritain are doing a global campaign, which Mogg has signed off £4m for quite rightly, and DCMS are just trying to get in on the act with a spare £800,000 that they had lying around. Seems like duplication of activity and he's absolutely right to shelve it.
These guys are volunteers and know what they are doing. Mountains need to be taken seriously.
Hmm! Glad to see they like best a map and OS reference. Despite the collective wisdom of much of PB.
Christ, not this again.
hedgehog.pig.toad is susceptible to about 10 errors (plurals, big for pig, towed). gridref 342546 is susceptible to 900,000 errors because no combination of 6 digits is "not a real number." It is not controversial which is the better way of communicating a position. If Keswick Mountain Rescue Team are too thick to recognise this I must remember not to get lost in Keswick.
They're volunteers. They are very good at what they do. Sometimes they get horribly injured trying to rescue people who don't listen to their advice.
Edit: indeed they mention the app I use, which is exactly the same as what3words but works for Mountain Rescue. OS locate.
Glancing at latest polls put up, Techne and Redfield showing widening gap on eve of new Leader.
But I suggest it’s not the gap we should look at, but the Tory share, currently on average herded less than 33 so the coming bounce can be measured by how it goes above 33, to the 35s and 36s.
Based on historical precedent, Will the coming bounce begin instantly next week or take a few weeks
Do we have a word for a negative bounce? A 'truss' perhaps?
I happened to be listening to Radio 2 earlier whose news featured the Ukrainian first lady admonishing us in the UK for focusing on our rising energy costs. They might want to use her less in future.
These guys are volunteers and know what they are doing. Mountains need to be taken seriously.
Hmm! Glad to see they like best a map and OS reference. Despite the collective wisdom of much of PB.
Christ, not this again.
hedgehog.pig.toad is susceptible to about 10 errors (plurals, big for pig, towed). gridref 342546 is susceptible to 900,000 errors because no combination of 6 digits is "not a real number." It is not controversial which is the better way of communicating a position. If Keswick Mountain Rescue Team are too thick to recognise this I must remember not to get lost in Keswick.
They're volunteers. They are very good at what they do. Sometimes they get horribly injured trying to rescue people who don't listen to their advice.
Edit: indeed they mention the app I use, which is exactly the same as what3words but works for Mountain Rescue. OS locate.
I broke down in the Highlands a couple of weeks ago and was asked what my what3words was. I said that I didn't have the app, but could provide a grid reference and the Gaelic spelling of the loch I was parked next too.
Also the rough location in reference to Callander and how far north I was. "I'm based in Sheffield mate, can you download the app?" FFS.
These guys are volunteers and know what they are doing. Mountains need to be taken seriously.
Absolutely nothing to do with taking mountains seriously, and someone involved hasn't a fucking clue what they are doing because you NEVER rely on just the one method of position fixing if you can possibly help it whether its what 3 words or grid ref or anything else, you say thanks for that, and where actually are you/what's near you? A grid reference has MUCH more scope for errors and ambiguities, like orders of magnitude more. This is not a point about what3words at all, it's about desirableredundancy.
I know this. But there are fairly routinely idiots who go walking around here completely unprepared for the terrain, the weather, the animals or the risks they put volunteer rescuers under.
Sadly, there have also been a number of cases of people drowning in the lakes this summer, not realising that swimming in a mountain lake is not like your local pool.
These guys are volunteers and know what they are doing. Mountains need to be taken seriously.
Absolutely nothing to do with taking mountains seriously, and someone involved hasn't a fucking clue what they are doing because you NEVER rely on just the one method of position fixing if you can possibly help it whether its what 3 words or grid ref or anything else, you say thanks for that, and where actually are you/what's near you? A grid reference has MUCH more scope for errors and ambiguities, like orders of magnitude more. This is not a point about what3words at all, it's about desirableredundancy.
I know this. But there are fairly routinely idiots who go walking around here completely unprepared for the terrain, the weather, the animals or the risks they put volunteer rescuers under.
Sadly, there have also been a number of cases of people drowning in the lakes this summer, not realising that swimming in a mountain lake is not like your local pool.
These guys are volunteers and know what they are doing. Mountains need to be taken seriously.
Hmm! Glad to see they like best a map and OS reference. Despite the collective wisdom of much of PB.
Christ, not this again.
hedgehog.pig.toad is susceptible to about 10 errors (plurals, big for pig, towed). gridref 342546 is susceptible to 900,000 errors because no combination of 6 digits is "not a real number." It is not controversial which is the better way of communicating a position. If Keswick Mountain Rescue Team are too thick to recognise this I must remember not to get lost in Keswick.
They're volunteers. They are very good at what they do. Sometimes they get horribly injured trying to rescue people who don't listen to their advice.
Edit: indeed they mention the app I use, which is exactly the same as what3words but works for Mountain Rescue. OS locate.
Yes their bravery is not in question, but that is not the point. It's a story about not just reading a position off a phone, dressed up as a story about one phone based system being better than another when it patently isn't. And if what3words doesn't "work for them" they need to retire as being not fit for purpose.
Remember when I said, all those hours ago, that AI will make the scariest horror movies EVER?
Here is an exceptionally early glimpse of what the machines might do. Like a scene from the worst nightmare in your worst nightmare. So deep in uncanny valley it is possibly emerging the other side of Planet Freak-out
People selling dalle and midjourney prompts for 2 to 5 dollars a pop
Which is insane, given that Stable Diffusion costs 1p a go and, as far as I can see, is just as good at most of this
Nope that's not the dalle charge, it's extra. What he does is exhibit results like your ghost children and say if you pay me 2 bucks I will disclose to you the prompt which created this. You then go off and put it into dalle.
Yes I understood that wasn't theDalle charge. But I didn't realise this guy was selling the prompts. Next time I will read a linked article before commenting...
But that's clever. Prompt selling. Makes total sense. Some people have good promptcraft, some don't. It is quite a peculiar thing. I have now discovered a bunch of prompt words which nearly always give you interesting, powerful results
They tend to be quite but not wholly unusual. I am making a list
AI has no imagination and it will "learn" from what prompt words people seem to like the results of and for which they keep instructing tweaked and retweaked images. Then when the same words get typed in again it will cut out the middle stages and try to appear highly intelligent, if giving the punters what they want is "intelligence". In short: it's a cool toy.
“I think there is a world market for maybe five computers.” Thomas Watson, president of IBM, 1943.
I do have some sympathy with what you're saying in that there is quite a big gap between learning to perform a task in a way that gives the appearance of intelligence, and actually being intelligent in the sense a human would understand it. For that reason, I'd not be surprised if we are many years further away from it than optimists (or pessimists, depending how you see it) believe.
But it probably is coming in the sense that there really isn't a ghost in the human machine and it's just an amazingly complex, beautiful, but ultimately replicable, set of connections.
More to the point, at a certain stage the appearance of intelligence and intelligence may as well be the same thing on a practical level.
I'm not totally sure that's right, for example on the issue of consciousness and the morality of how machines are treated.
Chess is a good example. Chess playing computers are incredibly good, and essentially indistinguishable to the observer, but ultimately I think (and I don't really know as I can't play chess for toffee) they are impersonating chess players by throwing overwhelming computing power at the problem. My suspicion is that human players are using following a very different process that computers probably will replicate in due course, but perhaps in the more distant future than many predict.
Well, that is as purely unscientific a belief as you could hope for. If the computers are already winning how will you tell the difference/
FWIW I can't play chess either, but human players tend to the view that a computer's game can look every bit as elegant and imaginative as a human's.
Because the person can have a conversation after the game and the computer can’t.
These guys are volunteers and know what they are doing. Mountains need to be taken seriously.
Hmm! Glad to see they like best a map and OS reference. Despite the collective wisdom of much of PB.
Christ, not this again.
hedgehog.pig.toad is susceptible to about 10 errors (plurals, big for pig, towed). gridref 342546 is susceptible to 900,000 errors because no combination of 6 digits is "not a real number." It is not controversial which is the better way of communicating a position. If Keswick Mountain Rescue Team are too thick to recognise this I must remember not to get lost in Keswick.
They're volunteers. They are very good at what they do. Sometimes they get horribly injured trying to rescue people who don't listen to their advice.
Edit: indeed they mention the app I use, which is exactly the same as what3words but works for Mountain Rescue. OS locate.
Yes their bravery is not in question, but that is not the point. It's a story about not just reading a position off a phone, dressed up as a story about one phone based system being better than another when it patently isn't. And if what3words doesn't "work for them" they need to retire as being not fit for purpose.
The story was that the what3words location was communicated incorrectly but was close enough to be a credible location. And this is happening regularly, so something is going badly wrong.
Why? Dunno. But I'd listen to the the poor people having to put up with it.
I happened to be listening to Radio 2 earlier whose news featured the Ukrainian first lady admonishing us in the UK for focusing on our rising energy costs. They might want to use her less in future.
She got me on side. The whole raping/murdering/invading thing does put stuff into perspective.
Remember when I said, all those hours ago, that AI will make the scariest horror movies EVER?
Here is an exceptionally early glimpse of what the machines might do. Like a scene from the worst nightmare in your worst nightmare. So deep in uncanny valley it is possibly emerging the other side of Planet Freak-out
People selling dalle and midjourney prompts for 2 to 5 dollars a pop
Which is insane, given that Stable Diffusion costs 1p a go and, as far as I can see, is just as good at most of this
Nope that's not the dalle charge, it's extra. What he does is exhibit results like your ghost children and say if you pay me 2 bucks I will disclose to you the prompt which created this. You then go off and put it into dalle.
Yes I understood that wasn't theDalle charge. But I didn't realise this guy was selling the prompts. Next time I will read a linked article before commenting...
But that's clever. Prompt selling. Makes total sense. Some people have good promptcraft, some don't. It is quite a peculiar thing. I have now discovered a bunch of prompt words which nearly always give you interesting, powerful results
They tend to be quite but not wholly unusual. I am making a list
AI has no imagination and it will "learn" from what prompt words people seem to like the results of and for which they keep instructing tweaked and retweaked images. Then when the same words get typed in again it will cut out the middle stages and try to appear highly intelligent, if giving the punters what they want is "intelligence". In short: it's a cool toy.
“I think there is a world market for maybe five computers.” Thomas Watson, president of IBM, 1943.
I do have some sympathy with what you're saying in that there is quite a big gap between learning to perform a task in a way that gives the appearance of intelligence, and actually being intelligent in the sense a human would understand it. For that reason, I'd not be surprised if we are many years further away from it than optimists (or pessimists, depending how you see it) believe.
But it probably is coming in the sense that there really isn't a ghost in the human machine and it's just an amazingly complex, beautiful, but ultimately replicable, set of connections.
More to the point, at a certain stage the appearance of intelligence and intelligence may as well be the same thing on a practical level.
I'm not totally sure that's right, for example on the issue of consciousness and the morality of how machines are treated.
Chess is a good example. Chess playing computers are incredibly good, and essentially indistinguishable to the observer, but ultimately I think (and I don't really know as I can't play chess for toffee) they are impersonating chess players by throwing overwhelming computing power at the problem. My suspicion is that human players are using following a very different process that computers probably will replicate in due course, but perhaps in the more distant future than many predict.
Well, that is as purely unscientific a belief as you could hope for. If the computers are already winning how will you tell the difference/
FWIW I can't play chess either, but human players tend to the view that a computer's game can look every bit as elegant and imaginative as a human's.
Because the person can have a conversation after the game and the computer can’t.
Hell, your computer chess opponent will soon be able to stun you with an original tortured artwork between every move. Probably.
Remember when I said, all those hours ago, that AI will make the scariest horror movies EVER?
Here is an exceptionally early glimpse of what the machines might do. Like a scene from the worst nightmare in your worst nightmare. So deep in uncanny valley it is possibly emerging the other side of Planet Freak-out
People selling dalle and midjourney prompts for 2 to 5 dollars a pop
Which is insane, given that Stable Diffusion costs 1p a go and, as far as I can see, is just as good at most of this
Nope that's not the dalle charge, it's extra. What he does is exhibit results like your ghost children and say if you pay me 2 bucks I will disclose to you the prompt which created this. You then go off and put it into dalle.
Yes I understood that wasn't theDalle charge. But I didn't realise this guy was selling the prompts. Next time I will read a linked article before commenting...
But that's clever. Prompt selling. Makes total sense. Some people have good promptcraft, some don't. It is quite a peculiar thing. I have now discovered a bunch of prompt words which nearly always give you interesting, powerful results
They tend to be quite but not wholly unusual. I am making a list
AI has no imagination and it will "learn" from what prompt words people seem to like the results of and for which they keep instructing tweaked and retweaked images. Then when the same words get typed in again it will cut out the middle stages and try to appear highly intelligent, if giving the punters what they want is "intelligence". In short: it's a cool toy.
“I think there is a world market for maybe five computers.” Thomas Watson, president of IBM, 1943.
I do have some sympathy with what you're saying in that there is quite a big gap between learning to perform a task in a way that gives the appearance of intelligence, and actually being intelligent in the sense a human would understand it. For that reason, I'd not be surprised if we are many years further away from it than optimists (or pessimists, depending how you see it) believe.
But it probably is coming in the sense that there really isn't a ghost in the human machine and it's just an amazingly complex, beautiful, but ultimately replicable, set of connections.
More to the point, at a certain stage the appearance of intelligence and intelligence may as well be the same thing on a practical level.
I'm not totally sure that's right, for example on the issue of consciousness and the morality of how machines are treated.
Chess is a good example. Chess playing computers are incredibly good, and essentially indistinguishable to the observer, but ultimately I think (and I don't really know as I can't play chess for toffee) they are impersonating chess players by throwing overwhelming computing power at the problem. My suspicion is that human players are using following a very different process that computers probably will replicate in due course, but perhaps in the more distant future than many predict.
Well, that is as purely unscientific a belief as you could hope for. If the computers are already winning how will you tell the difference/
FWIW I can't play chess either, but human players tend to the view that a computer's game can look every bit as elegant and imaginative as a human's.
Because the person can have a conversation after the game and the computer can’t.
Hell, your computer chess opponent will soon be able to stun you with an original tortured artwork between every move. Probably.
We have already speculated whether the tortured arguments of some on PB.com could be computer-generated!
I happened to be listening to Radio 2 earlier whose news featured the Ukrainian first lady admonishing us in the UK for focusing on our rising energy costs. They might want to use her less in future.
She got me on side. The whole raping/murdering/invading thing does put stuff into perspective.
Well, whatever tickles your pickle I suppose - I thought she came over as a rude, ungrateful cow.
These guys are volunteers and know what they are doing. Mountains need to be taken seriously.
Hmm! Glad to see they like best a map and OS reference. Despite the collective wisdom of much of PB.
Christ, not this again.
hedgehog.pig.toad is susceptible to about 10 errors (plurals, big for pig, towed). gridref 342546 is susceptible to 900,000 errors because no combination of 6 digits is "not a real number." It is not controversial which is the better way of communicating a position. If Keswick Mountain Rescue Team are too thick to recognise this I must remember not to get lost in Keswick.
They're volunteers. They are very good at what they do. Sometimes they get horribly injured trying to rescue people who don't listen to their advice.
Edit: indeed they mention the app I use, which is exactly the same as what3words but works for Mountain Rescue. OS locate.
Yes their bravery is not in question, but that is not the point. It's a story about not just reading a position off a phone, dressed up as a story about one phone based system being better than another when it patently isn't. And if what3words doesn't "work for them" they need to retire as being not fit for purpose.
The story was that the what3words location was communicated incorrectly but was close enough to be a credible location. And this is happening regularly, so something is going badly wrong.
Why? Dunno. But I'd listen to the the poor people having to put up with it.
And they never get a garbled 6 figure OS reference? LOL
These guys are volunteers and know what they are doing. Mountains need to be taken seriously.
Hmm! Glad to see they like best a map and OS reference. Despite the collective wisdom of much of PB.
Christ, not this again.
hedgehog.pig.toad is susceptible to about 10 errors (plurals, big for pig, towed). gridref 342546 is susceptible to 900,000 errors because no combination of 6 digits is "not a real number." It is not controversial which is the better way of communicating a position. If Keswick Mountain Rescue Team are too thick to recognise this I must remember not to get lost in Keswick.
For me, the biggest issue with w3w is that it is a private system and privately owned. Unlike (say) the OSGB grid, if I want to use their API or convert references to lat/long, I need to pay for a licence.
Which is fine as it is a private company, but I'd be slightly nervous about getting all our emergency services used to using it, only to find the licence fee has gone up, or starts being applied to them. They also have access to all the locations you look up.
These guys are volunteers and know what they are doing. Mountains need to be taken seriously.
Hmm! Glad to see they like best a map and OS reference. Despite the collective wisdom of much of PB.
Christ, not this again.
hedgehog.pig.toad is susceptible to about 10 errors (plurals, big for pig, towed). gridref 342546 is susceptible to 900,000 errors because no combination of 6 digits is "not a real number." It is not controversial which is the better way of communicating a position. If Keswick Mountain Rescue Team are too thick to recognise this I must remember not to get lost in Keswick.
They're volunteers. They are very good at what they do. Sometimes they get horribly injured trying to rescue people who don't listen to their advice.
Edit: indeed they mention the app I use, which is exactly the same as what3words but works for Mountain Rescue. OS locate.
I broke down in the Highlands a couple of weeks ago and was asked what my what3words was. I said that I didn't have the app, but could provide a grid reference and the Gaelic spelling of the loch I was parked next too.
Also the rough location in reference to Callander and how far north I was. "I'm based in Sheffield mate, can you download the app?" FFS.
Just. Download. The. App
The sooner everyone in the world downloads the app the quicker and better it will work. Tis that simple
These guys are volunteers and know what they are doing. Mountains need to be taken seriously.
Hmm! Glad to see they like best a map and OS reference. Despite the collective wisdom of much of PB.
Christ, not this again.
hedgehog.pig.toad is susceptible to about 10 errors (plurals, big for pig, towed). gridref 342546 is susceptible to 900,000 errors because no combination of 6 digits is "not a real number." It is not controversial which is the better way of communicating a position. If Keswick Mountain Rescue Team are too thick to recognise this I must remember not to get lost in Keswick.
They're volunteers. They are very good at what they do. Sometimes they get horribly injured trying to rescue people who don't listen to their advice.
Edit: indeed they mention the app I use, which is exactly the same as what3words but works for Mountain Rescue. OS locate.
I broke down in the Highlands a couple of weeks ago and was asked what my what3words was. I said that I didn't have the app, but could provide a grid reference and the Gaelic spelling of the loch I was parked next too.
Also the rough location in reference to Callander and how far north I was. "I'm based in Sheffield mate, can you download the app?" FFS.
I hereby inaugurate the annual @Dura_Ace Hydraulic Stamp Trophy, given to the commenter who manages to comment despite being significantly injured or severely ill as he or she types. Bonus points for the most spectacular injuries or incapacitation
Anyone who actually dies while commenting gets a Lifetime Achievement Award
Remember when I said, all those hours ago, that AI will make the scariest horror movies EVER?
Here is an exceptionally early glimpse of what the machines might do. Like a scene from the worst nightmare in your worst nightmare. So deep in uncanny valley it is possibly emerging the other side of Planet Freak-out
People selling dalle and midjourney prompts for 2 to 5 dollars a pop
Which is insane, given that Stable Diffusion costs 1p a go and, as far as I can see, is just as good at most of this
Nope that's not the dalle charge, it's extra. What he does is exhibit results like your ghost children and say if you pay me 2 bucks I will disclose to you the prompt which created this. You then go off and put it into dalle.
Yes I understood that wasn't theDalle charge. But I didn't realise this guy was selling the prompts. Next time I will read a linked article before commenting...
But that's clever. Prompt selling. Makes total sense. Some people have good promptcraft, some don't. It is quite a peculiar thing. I have now discovered a bunch of prompt words which nearly always give you interesting, powerful results
They tend to be quite but not wholly unusual. I am making a list
AI has no imagination and it will "learn" from what prompt words people seem to like the results of and for which they keep instructing tweaked and retweaked images. Then when the same words get typed in again it will cut out the middle stages and try to appear highly intelligent, if giving the punters what they want is "intelligence". In short: it's a cool toy.
“I think there is a world market for maybe five computers.” Thomas Watson, president of IBM, 1943.
I do have some sympathy with what you're saying in that there is quite a big gap between learning to perform a task in a way that gives the appearance of intelligence, and actually being intelligent in the sense a human would understand it. For that reason, I'd not be surprised if we are many years further away from it than optimists (or pessimists, depending how you see it) believe.
But it probably is coming in the sense that there really isn't a ghost in the human machine and it's just an amazingly complex, beautiful, but ultimately replicable, set of connections.
More to the point, at a certain stage the appearance of intelligence and intelligence may as well be the same thing on a practical level.
I'm not totally sure that's right, for example on the issue of consciousness and the morality of how machines are treated.
Chess is a good example. Chess playing computers are incredibly good, and essentially indistinguishable to the observer, but ultimately I think (and I don't really know as I can't play chess for toffee) they are impersonating chess players by throwing overwhelming computing power at the problem. My suspicion is that human players are using following a very different process that computers probably will replicate in due course, but perhaps in the more distant future than many predict.
Well, that is as purely unscientific a belief as you could hope for. If the computers are already winning how will you tell the difference/
FWIW I can't play chess either, but human players tend to the view that a computer's game can look every bit as elegant and imaginative as a human's.
Yes, but what do computers have to say about the game?
Here's the Washington Post's take on Liz Truss: "Truss has held six ministerial posts under three prime ministers, including 11 months as foreign minister. Yet after her years of public service and a summer making her pitch to Conservative Party activists, many Britons confess they don’t really know Truss. Not the way they knew Boris Johnson — former London mayor, newspaper columnist, colorful orator, serial prevaricator — when he took office just a few years ago.
It’s fair to say Truss is a shapeshifter. She fought for Britain to remain in the European Union before becoming a staunch defender of Brexit. Her supporters say she accepted the outcome of the 2016 referendum and got with the program. Others say she’s a weather vane, pivoting when it suits her advancement." source$: https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/09/03/liz-truss-uk-prime-minister/
(I gather most of you agree with that "serial prevaricator" description of your current prime minister.)
Remember when I said, all those hours ago, that AI will make the scariest horror movies EVER?
Here is an exceptionally early glimpse of what the machines might do. Like a scene from the worst nightmare in your worst nightmare. So deep in uncanny valley it is possibly emerging the other side of Planet Freak-out
People selling dalle and midjourney prompts for 2 to 5 dollars a pop
Which is insane, given that Stable Diffusion costs 1p a go and, as far as I can see, is just as good at most of this
Nope that's not the dalle charge, it's extra. What he does is exhibit results like your ghost children and say if you pay me 2 bucks I will disclose to you the prompt which created this. You then go off and put it into dalle.
Yes I understood that wasn't theDalle charge. But I didn't realise this guy was selling the prompts. Next time I will read a linked article before commenting...
But that's clever. Prompt selling. Makes total sense. Some people have good promptcraft, some don't. It is quite a peculiar thing. I have now discovered a bunch of prompt words which nearly always give you interesting, powerful results
They tend to be quite but not wholly unusual. I am making a list
AI has no imagination and it will "learn" from what prompt words people seem to like the results of and for which they keep instructing tweaked and retweaked images. Then when the same words get typed in again it will cut out the middle stages and try to appear highly intelligent, if giving the punters what they want is "intelligence". In short: it's a cool toy.
“I think there is a world market for maybe five computers.” Thomas Watson, president of IBM, 1943.
I do have some sympathy with what you're saying in that there is quite a big gap between learning to perform a task in a way that gives the appearance of intelligence, and actually being intelligent in the sense a human would understand it. For that reason, I'd not be surprised if we are many years further away from it than optimists (or pessimists, depending how you see it) believe.
But it probably is coming in the sense that there really isn't a ghost in the human machine and it's just an amazingly complex, beautiful, but ultimately replicable, set of connections.
More to the point, at a certain stage the appearance of intelligence and intelligence may as well be the same thing on a practical level.
I'm not totally sure that's right, for example on the issue of consciousness and the morality of how machines are treated.
Chess is a good example. Chess playing computers are incredibly good, and essentially indistinguishable to the observer, but ultimately I think (and I don't really know as I can't play chess for toffee) they are impersonating chess players by throwing overwhelming computing power at the problem. My suspicion is that human players are using following a very different process that computers probably will replicate in due course, but perhaps in the more distant future than many predict.
Well, that is as purely unscientific a belief as you could hope for. If the computers are already winning how will you tell the difference/
FWIW I can't play chess either, but human players tend to the view that a computer's game can look every bit as elegant and imaginative as a human's.
Yes, but what do computers have to say about the game?
Looks like HMS Broken Propeller is under tow, with three tugs helping it east. If it's heading towards Rosyth is going to take at least five days to make it there at the speed they're going.
It looks like they've turned the tracking off on the carrier itself, no update for two hours from its anchored position on the marine traffic app, but you can see the tugs.
Now berthed near the Mary Rose museum. Perhaps not all of the crew will be part of the journey to Rosyth.
Remember when I said, all those hours ago, that AI will make the scariest horror movies EVER?
Here is an exceptionally early glimpse of what the machines might do. Like a scene from the worst nightmare in your worst nightmare. So deep in uncanny valley it is possibly emerging the other side of Planet Freak-out
People selling dalle and midjourney prompts for 2 to 5 dollars a pop
Which is insane, given that Stable Diffusion costs 1p a go and, as far as I can see, is just as good at most of this
Nope that's not the dalle charge, it's extra. What he does is exhibit results like your ghost children and say if you pay me 2 bucks I will disclose to you the prompt which created this. You then go off and put it into dalle.
Yes I understood that wasn't theDalle charge. But I didn't realise this guy was selling the prompts. Next time I will read a linked article before commenting...
But that's clever. Prompt selling. Makes total sense. Some people have good promptcraft, some don't. It is quite a peculiar thing. I have now discovered a bunch of prompt words which nearly always give you interesting, powerful results
They tend to be quite but not wholly unusual. I am making a list
AI has no imagination and it will "learn" from what prompt words people seem to like the results of and for which they keep instructing tweaked and retweaked images. Then when the same words get typed in again it will cut out the middle stages and try to appear highly intelligent, if giving the punters what they want is "intelligence". In short: it's a cool toy.
“I think there is a world market for maybe five computers.” Thomas Watson, president of IBM, 1943.
I do have some sympathy with what you're saying in that there is quite a big gap between learning to perform a task in a way that gives the appearance of intelligence, and actually being intelligent in the sense a human would understand it. For that reason, I'd not be surprised if we are many years further away from it than optimists (or pessimists, depending how you see it) believe.
But it probably is coming in the sense that there really isn't a ghost in the human machine and it's just an amazingly complex, beautiful, but ultimately replicable, set of connections.
More to the point, at a certain stage the appearance of intelligence and intelligence may as well be the same thing on a practical level.
I'm not totally sure that's right, for example on the issue of consciousness and the morality of how machines are treated.
Chess is a good example. Chess playing computers are incredibly good, and essentially indistinguishable to the observer, but ultimately I think (and I don't really know as I can't play chess for toffee) they are impersonating chess players by throwing overwhelming computing power at the problem. My suspicion is that human players are using following a very different process that computers probably will replicate in due course, but perhaps in the more distant future than many predict.
Well, that is as purely unscientific a belief as you could hope for. If the computers are already winning how will you tell the difference/
FWIW I can't play chess either, but human players tend to the view that a computer's game can look every bit as elegant and imaginative as a human's.
Yes, but what do computers have to say about the game?
Are all you meatsacks this shit at this?
In a reverse Wargames, humans being so shit at chess is what leads Skynet to prefer the game of global thermonuclear warfare.
I wonder why Father Calv crowbarred paedophillia into a tweet about transgender issues?
Only joking, I know exactly why he did!
Actually there is genuine concern about why some people may be keen to encourage the use of puberty blockers. It is worthy of consideration.
Genuine concerns about x, words to define the age we live in.
I know we don't see eye to eye on much UD, but Babylon Berlin is utterly FAB and thanks again for the recommendation.
👍 Cool. I admit to have becoming totally fanboi about the series to the point of being evangelical, but glad if I've made at least one convert!
I liked Rings of Power a lot. Am I alone here?
First of all, the elements we can all agree on? There’s nothing wrong with the excellent soundtrack and score, use of music and sound was good. And the Title Sequence is quite excellent too. I enjoyed the visual spectacle - the hidden Hobbit village coming alive was very good.
Pacing we could argue over. I thought the first episode had a good pace. There was discussion here last week, horror tales tend be short, if it’s long then it becomes more than horror - similar here in that making Rings of Power have pace, action and suspense it has to move away from pure Tolkienism - indeed hiding from, and the battle with the big Orc, sequence Spielberg would have been proud of.
And whilst some of the script was a little lame, some performances were very good. Markella Kavenagh steals acting honours as adventurous Hobbit Nori - Ismael Córdova as buttoned up Elf Arondir likeable too.
Too early to say about Characterisation just two episodes in. Accents. Maybe a bit like Derry Girls doing Midsummer Nights Dream at times?
If Tolkien purists were to argue it’s not true to Tolkien enough, I would argue it builds upon what Tolkien offered, mankind fighting for Morgoth so held in suspicion for example. For purists I’m reminded about what Stu from Romford said about ism’s earlier today. How do the purists know that the man himself wouldn’t watch this and enjoy it?
Loved Galadriel’s warrior eye make up when she took down the troll, I’m going to do mine like that. 😍
You're also the only remaining fan of Yorkshire County Cricket Club. That's a warning light about your judgment
What would Tolkien have thought? Well, there are a couple of answers to that. First of all, he really hated people making changes to his ideas. In fact he vetoed several possible film productions of the Lord of the rings because they wanted to alter plot points, commenting, 'I don't mind people leaving things out, but I wish they wouldn't change things.' Therefore, we can probably say that he would be pretty pissed off with what's been done here in terms of his Legendarium.
However, there is another side to this. The character of Galadriel in particular changed a great deal as he was writing about her. So, for example, in the fellowship of the ring she describes herself as having passed over the mountains of the fall of Nargothrond or Gondolin to join Celeborn who is that point appears to have been a Nandorin elf. However by the time he wrote the appendices he changed his mind and Celeborn and Galadriel ran the kingdom of south Lindon for many years after the end of the second age having met in Doriath.
Yet another version of her backstory in unfinished tales shows her and Celeborn as the Lord and Lady of Eregion having founded it sometime after the end of the first stage.
Now, anyone of these could make an excellent story which makes it deeply puzzling that the writers have decided to ditch the whole bloody lot and come up with something totally different but wildly inconsistent with the texts and in fact not very convincing on the first couple of episodes.
Which is roughly why I'm not very impressed with them.
I happened to be listening to Radio 2 earlier whose news featured the Ukrainian first lady admonishing us in the UK for focusing on our rising energy costs. They might want to use her less in future.
She got me on side. The whole raping/murdering/invading thing does put stuff into perspective.
Well, whatever tickles your pickle I suppose - I thought she came over as a rude, ungrateful cow.
Here's the Washington Post's take on Liz Truss: "Truss has held six ministerial posts under three prime ministers, including 11 months as foreign minister. Yet after her years of public service and a summer making her pitch to Conservative Party activists, many Britons confess they don’t really know Truss. Not the way they knew Boris Johnson — former London mayor, newspaper columnist, colorful orator, serial prevaricator — when he took office just a few years ago.
It’s fair to say Truss is a shapeshifter. She fought for Britain to remain in the European Union before becoming a staunch defender of Brexit. Her supporters say she accepted the outcome of the 2016 referendum and got with the program. Others say she’s a weather vane, pivoting when it suits her advancement." source$: https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/09/03/liz-truss-uk-prime-minister/
(I gather most of you agree with that "serial prevaricator" description of your current prime minister.)
If Leon types “serial prevaricator” into his AI art thingy I’m hoping he gets a picture of a T-Rex type dinosaur with a blonde wig about to tuck into a bowl of Frosties. But the arms are too short to get the spoon to the bowl.
A sad metaphor for her policies not reaching the hungry this winter or something.
Smarkets opened their “next Con leader after Sunak/Truss” market a week or so ago, with Boris at 33/1. Someone sharp nicked that before I could get on. By the time I noticed, he was down to 16/1. I took all I could. Now down to 10/1. £42 available at that price.
Probably still value. As Mike said, I’d guess Boris will be fav on the BF market when it gets going. Perhaps between 3/1 & 6/1.
I generally hate bets like this that hinge on someone’s motivations and personal decisions, rather than election outcomes, but value is value and you’ve got to take it when ye find it…
The bet is of course on two quite different sorts of event. One is that Truss bombs within months, to the point that there is a real financial crisis and the party panics. Going back to Johnson at that point looks quite likely - - they aren't going to say "Oh, well, Sunak then", and rerunning the whole thing in mid-crisis looks unreal. Johnson comes back, with his trademark rueful look - "yes, I made some mistakes, and this time it'll be different".
The other event is losing a GE in 2024. By that time, reverting to Johnson will feel quite strange and I'd think the cast of alternative candidates will be greater; conversely, not being in government, they can take as long as they like.
Case 1 is maybe a 20% chance, case 2 more like 5%.
These guys are volunteers and know what they are doing. Mountains need to be taken seriously.
Hmm! Glad to see they like best a map and OS reference. Despite the collective wisdom of much of PB.
Christ, not this again.
hedgehog.pig.toad is susceptible to about 10 errors (plurals, big for pig, towed). gridref 342546 is susceptible to 900,000 errors because no combination of 6 digits is "not a real number." It is not controversial which is the better way of communicating a position. If Keswick Mountain Rescue Team are too thick to recognise this I must remember not to get lost in Keswick.
Smarkets opened their “next Con leader after Sunak/Truss” market a week or so ago, with Boris at 33/1. Someone sharp nicked that before I could get on. By the time I noticed, he was down to 16/1. I took all I could. Now down to 10/1. £42 available at that price.
Probably still value. As Mike said, I’d guess Boris will be fav on the BF market when it gets going. Perhaps between 3/1 & 6/1.
I generally hate bets like this that hinge on someone’s motivations and personal decisions, rather than election outcomes, but value is value and you’ve got to take it when ye find it…
The bet is of course on two quite different sorts of event. One is that Truss bombs within months, to the point that there is a real financial crisis and the party panics. Going back to Johnson at that point looks quite likely - - they aren't going to say "Oh, well, Sunak then", and rerunning the whole thing in mid-crisis looks unreal. Johnson comes back, with his trademark rueful look - "yes, I made some mistakes, and this time it'll be different".
The other event is losing a GE in 2024. By that time, reverting to Johnson will feel quite strange and I'd think the cast of alternative candidates will be greater; conversely, not being in government, they can take as long as they like.
Case 1 is maybe a 20% chance, case 2 more like 5%.
Interesting. And of course you have to weigh up the odds in the light of current and future behaviour of the relevant people, and without reference to reality.
It's a sort of Trump minor. The idea that Trump is the answer to USA leadership is of course nonsense. Past events demonstrate that beyond doubt.
Ditto Boris. The several million Tory voters (like me) who have switched votes or become DKs did so under Boris, and for reasons that won't go away.
The swing voters here are: Tory voters who were Labour till recently; centrist Tories who can't stomach the 'we are the masters now' thing; and centrists who above all want boring competence.
It is very unlikely that Truss is their answer to how to come back to the Tories. Boris is the problem for these groups, not the solution.
None of this counts with Tory members. Bet accordingly.
I wonder why Father Calv crowbarred paedophillia into a tweet about transgender issues?
Only joking, I know exactly why he did!
Actually there is genuine concern about why some people may be keen to encourage the use of puberty blockers. It is worthy of consideration.
Genuine concerns about x, words to define the age we live in.
I know we don't see eye to eye on much UD, but Babylon Berlin is utterly FAB and thanks again for the recommendation.
👍 Cool. I admit to have becoming totally fanboi about the series to the point of being evangelical, but glad if I've made at least one convert!
I liked Rings of Power a lot. Am I alone here?
First of all, the elements we can all agree on? There’s nothing wrong with the excellent soundtrack and score, use of music and sound was good. And the Title Sequence is quite excellent too. I enjoyed the visual spectacle - the hidden Hobbit village coming alive was very good.
Pacing we could argue over. I thought the first episode had a good pace. There was discussion here last week, horror tales tend be short, if it’s long then it becomes more than horror - similar here in that making Rings of Power have pace, action and suspense it has to move away from pure Tolkienism - indeed hiding from, and the battle with the big Orc, sequence Spielberg would have been proud of.
And whilst some of the script was a little lame, some performances were very good. Markella Kavenagh steals acting honours as adventurous Hobbit Nori - Ismael Córdova as buttoned up Elf Arondir likeable too.
Too early to say about Characterisation just two episodes in. Accents. Maybe a bit like Derry Girls doing Midsummer Nights Dream at times?
If Tolkien purists were to argue it’s not true to Tolkien enough, I would argue it builds upon what Tolkien offered, mankind fighting for Morgoth so held in suspicion for example. For purists I’m reminded about what Stu from Romford said about ism’s earlier today. How do the purists know that the man himself wouldn’t watch this and enjoy it?
Loved Galadriel’s warrior eye make up when she took down the troll, I’m going to do mine like that. 😍
You're also the only remaining fan of Yorkshire County Cricket Club. That's a warning light about your judgment
What would Tolkien have thought? Well, there are a couple of answers to that. First of all, he really hated people making changes to his ideas. In fact he vetoed several possible film productions of the Lord of the rings because they wanted to alter plot points, commenting, 'I don't mind people leaving things out, but I wish they wouldn't change things.' Therefore, we can probably say that he would be pretty pissed off with what's been done here in terms of his Legendarium.
However, there is another side to this. The character of Galadriel in particular changed a great deal as he was writing about her. So, for example, in the fellowship of the ring she describes herself as having passed over the mountains of the fall of Nargothrond or Gondolin to join Celeborn who is that point appears to have been a Nandorin elf. However by the time he wrote the appendices he changed his mind and Celeborn and Galadriel ran the kingdom of south Lindon for many years after the end of the second age having met in Doriath.
Yet another version of her backstory in unfinished tales shows her and Celeborn as the Lord and Lady of Eregion having founded it sometime after the end of the first stage.
Now, anyone of these could make an excellent story which makes it deeply puzzling that the writers have decided to ditch the whole bloody lot and come up with something totally different but wildly inconsistent with the texts and in fact not very convincing on the first couple of episodes.
Which is roughly why I'm not very impressed with them.
The thing is: I really don't care what Tolkien would have thought. I want an entertaining story, well told. Perhaps there were reasons for the changes; perhaps not. It's a series *inspired* by his writing, not a word-for-word reciting of the story.
In the same way the TV series 'Elementary' had very little connection with Conan Doyle's stories, but was still far more faithful than the BBC's Sherlock.
I wonder why Father Calv crowbarred paedophillia into a tweet about transgender issues?
Only joking, I know exactly why he did!
Actually there is genuine concern about why some people may be keen to encourage the use of puberty blockers. It is worthy of consideration.
Genuine concerns about x, words to define the age we live in.
I know we don't see eye to eye on much UD, but Babylon Berlin is utterly FAB and thanks again for the recommendation.
👍 Cool. I admit to have becoming totally fanboi about the series to the point of being evangelical, but glad if I've made at least one convert!
I liked Rings of Power a lot. Am I alone here?
First of all, the elements we can all agree on? There’s nothing wrong with the excellent soundtrack and score, use of music and sound was good. And the Title Sequence is quite excellent too. I enjoyed the visual spectacle - the hidden Hobbit village coming alive was very good.
Pacing we could argue over. I thought the first episode had a good pace. There was discussion here last week, horror tales tend be short, if it’s long then it becomes more than horror - similar here in that making Rings of Power have pace, action and suspense it has to move away from pure Tolkienism - indeed hiding from, and the battle with the big Orc, sequence Spielberg would have been proud of.
And whilst some of the script was a little lame, some performances were very good. Markella Kavenagh steals acting honours as adventurous Hobbit Nori - Ismael Córdova as buttoned up Elf Arondir likeable too.
Too early to say about Characterisation just two episodes in. Accents. Maybe a bit like Derry Girls doing Midsummer Nights Dream at times?
If Tolkien purists were to argue it’s not true to Tolkien enough, I would argue it builds upon what Tolkien offered, mankind fighting for Morgoth so held in suspicion for example. For purists I’m reminded about what Stu from Romford said about ism’s earlier today. How do the purists know that the man himself wouldn’t watch this and enjoy it?
Loved Galadriel’s warrior eye make up when she took down the troll, I’m going to do mine like that. 😍
You're also the only remaining fan of Yorkshire County Cricket Club. That's a warning light about your judgment
What would Tolkien have thought? Well, there are a couple of answers to that. First of all, he really hated people making changes to his ideas. In fact he vetoed several possible film productions of the Lord of the rings because they wanted to alter plot points, commenting, 'I don't mind people leaving things out, but I wish they wouldn't change things.' Therefore, we can probably say that he would be pretty pissed off with what's been done here in terms of his Legendarium.
However, there is another side to this. The character of Galadriel in particular changed a great deal as he was writing about her. So, for example, in the fellowship of the ring she describes herself as having passed over the mountains of the fall of Nargothrond or Gondolin to join Celeborn who is that point appears to have been a Nandorin elf. However by the time he wrote the appendices he changed his mind and Celeborn and Galadriel ran the kingdom of south Lindon for many years after the end of the second age having met in Doriath.
Yet another version of her backstory in unfinished tales shows her and Celeborn as the Lord and Lady of Eregion having founded it sometime after the end of the first stage.
Now, anyone of these could make an excellent story which makes it deeply puzzling that the writers have decided to ditch the whole bloody lot and come up with something totally different but wildly inconsistent with the texts and in fact not very convincing on the first couple of episodes.
Which is roughly why I'm not very impressed with them.
The thing is: I really don't care what Tolkien would have thought. I want an entertaining story, well told. Perhaps there were reasons for the changes; perhaps not. It's a series *inspired* by his writing, not a word-for-word reciting of the story.
In the same way the TV series 'Elementary' had very little connection with Conan Doyle's stories, but was still far more faithful than the BBC's Sherlock.
Perhaps. But so far, I haven't found this especially entertaining. Certainly less so than any of the ideas they could have picked up and run with from Tolkien's writing.
I've watched an episode and a half. It's unlikely I'll watch the rest.
I wonder why Father Calv crowbarred paedophillia into a tweet about transgender issues?
Only joking, I know exactly why he did!
Actually there is genuine concern about why some people may be keen to encourage the use of puberty blockers. It is worthy of consideration.
Genuine concerns about x, words to define the age we live in.
I know we don't see eye to eye on much UD, but Babylon Berlin is utterly FAB and thanks again for the recommendation.
👍 Cool. I admit to have becoming totally fanboi about the series to the point of being evangelical, but glad if I've made at least one convert!
I liked Rings of Power a lot. Am I alone here?
First of all, the elements we can all agree on? There’s nothing wrong with the excellent soundtrack and score, use of music and sound was good. And the Title Sequence is quite excellent too. I enjoyed the visual spectacle - the hidden Hobbit village coming alive was very good.
Pacing we could argue over. I thought the first episode had a good pace. There was discussion here last week, horror tales tend be short, if it’s long then it becomes more than horror - similar here in that making Rings of Power have pace, action and suspense it has to move away from pure Tolkienism - indeed hiding from, and the battle with the big Orc, sequence Spielberg would have been proud of.
And whilst some of the script was a little lame, some performances were very good. Markella Kavenagh steals acting honours as adventurous Hobbit Nori - Ismael Córdova as buttoned up Elf Arondir likeable too.
Too early to say about Characterisation just two episodes in. Accents. Maybe a bit like Derry Girls doing Midsummer Nights Dream at times?
If Tolkien purists were to argue it’s not true to Tolkien enough, I would argue it builds upon what Tolkien offered, mankind fighting for Morgoth so held in suspicion for example. For purists I’m reminded about what Stu from Romford said about ism’s earlier today. How do the purists know that the man himself wouldn’t watch this and enjoy it?
Loved Galadriel’s warrior eye make up when she took down the troll, I’m going to do mine like that. 😍
You're also the only remaining fan of Yorkshire County Cricket Club. That's a warning light about your judgment
What would Tolkien have thought? Well, there are a couple of answers to that. First of all, he really hated people making changes to his ideas. In fact he vetoed several possible film productions of the Lord of the rings because they wanted to alter plot points, commenting, 'I don't mind people leaving things out, but I wish they wouldn't change things.' Therefore, we can probably say that he would be pretty pissed off with what's been done here in terms of his Legendarium.
However, there is another side to this. The character of Galadriel in particular changed a great deal as he was writing about her. So, for example, in the fellowship of the ring she describes herself as having passed over the mountains of the fall of Nargothrond or Gondolin to join Celeborn who is that point appears to have been a Nandorin elf. However by the time he wrote the appendices he changed his mind and Celeborn and Galadriel ran the kingdom of south Lindon for many years after the end of the second age having met in Doriath.
Yet another version of her backstory in unfinished tales shows her and Celeborn as the Lord and Lady of Eregion having founded it sometime after the end of the first stage.
Now, anyone of these could make an excellent story which makes it deeply puzzling that the writers have decided to ditch the whole bloody lot and come up with something totally different but wildly inconsistent with the texts and in fact not very convincing on the first couple of episodes.
Which is roughly why I'm not very impressed with them.
The thing is: I really don't care what Tolkien would have thought. I want an entertaining story, well told. Perhaps there were reasons for the changes; perhaps not. It's a series *inspired* by his writing, not a word-for-word reciting of the story.
In the same way the TV series 'Elementary' had very little connection with Conan Doyle's stories, but was still far more faithful than the BBC's Sherlock.
Perhaps. But so far, I haven't found this especially entertaining. Certainly less so than any of the ideas they could have picked up and run with from Tolkien's writing.
I've watched an episode and a half. It's unlikely I'll watch the rest.
It's not entertaining? Then it's like the Silmarillion. Or even LotR.
I wonder why Father Calv crowbarred paedophillia into a tweet about transgender issues?
Only joking, I know exactly why he did!
Actually there is genuine concern about why some people may be keen to encourage the use of puberty blockers. It is worthy of consideration.
Genuine concerns about x, words to define the age we live in.
I know we don't see eye to eye on much UD, but Babylon Berlin is utterly FAB and thanks again for the recommendation.
👍 Cool. I admit to have becoming totally fanboi about the series to the point of being evangelical, but glad if I've made at least one convert!
I liked Rings of Power a lot. Am I alone here?
First of all, the elements we can all agree on? There’s nothing wrong with the excellent soundtrack and score, use of music and sound was good. And the Title Sequence is quite excellent too. I enjoyed the visual spectacle - the hidden Hobbit village coming alive was very good.
Pacing we could argue over. I thought the first episode had a good pace. There was discussion here last week, horror tales tend be short, if it’s long then it becomes more than horror - similar here in that making Rings of Power have pace, action and suspense it has to move away from pure Tolkienism - indeed hiding from, and the battle with the big Orc, sequence Spielberg would have been proud of.
And whilst some of the script was a little lame, some performances were very good. Markella Kavenagh steals acting honours as adventurous Hobbit Nori - Ismael Córdova as buttoned up Elf Arondir likeable too.
Too early to say about Characterisation just two episodes in. Accents. Maybe a bit like Derry Girls doing Midsummer Nights Dream at times?
If Tolkien purists were to argue it’s not true to Tolkien enough, I would argue it builds upon what Tolkien offered, mankind fighting for Morgoth so held in suspicion for example. For purists I’m reminded about what Stu from Romford said about ism’s earlier today. How do the purists know that the man himself wouldn’t watch this and enjoy it?
Loved Galadriel’s warrior eye make up when she took down the troll, I’m going to do mine like that. 😍
You're also the only remaining fan of Yorkshire County Cricket Club. That's a warning light about your judgment
What would Tolkien have thought? Well, there are a couple of answers to that. First of all, he really hated people making changes to his ideas. In fact he vetoed several possible film productions of the Lord of the rings because they wanted to alter plot points, commenting, 'I don't mind people leaving things out, but I wish they wouldn't change things.' Therefore, we can probably say that he would be pretty pissed off with what's been done here in terms of his Legendarium.
However, there is another side to this. The character of Galadriel in particular changed a great deal as he was writing about her. So, for example, in the fellowship of the ring she describes herself as having passed over the mountains of the fall of Nargothrond or Gondolin to join Celeborn who is that point appears to have been a Nandorin elf. However by the time he wrote the appendices he changed his mind and Celeborn and Galadriel ran the kingdom of south Lindon for many years after the end of the second age having met in Doriath.
Yet another version of her backstory in unfinished tales shows her and Celeborn as the Lord and Lady of Eregion having founded it sometime after the end of the first stage.
Now, anyone of these could make an excellent story which makes it deeply puzzling that the writers have decided to ditch the whole bloody lot and come up with something totally different but wildly inconsistent with the texts and in fact not very convincing on the first couple of episodes.
Which is roughly why I'm not very impressed with them.
The thing is: I really don't care what Tolkien would have thought. I want an entertaining story, well told. Perhaps there were reasons for the changes; perhaps not. It's a series *inspired* by his writing, not a word-for-word reciting of the story.
In the same way the TV series 'Elementary' had very little connection with Conan Doyle's stories, but was still far more faithful than the BBC's Sherlock.
Perhaps. But so far, I haven't found this especially entertaining. Certainly less so than any of the ideas they could have picked up and run with from Tolkien's writing.
I've watched an episode and a half. It's unlikely I'll watch the rest.
I wonder why Father Calv crowbarred paedophillia into a tweet about transgender issues?
Only joking, I know exactly why he did!
Actually there is genuine concern about why some people may be keen to encourage the use of puberty blockers. It is worthy of consideration.
Genuine concerns about x, words to define the age we live in.
I know we don't see eye to eye on much UD, but Babylon Berlin is utterly FAB and thanks again for the recommendation.
👍 Cool. I admit to have becoming totally fanboi about the series to the point of being evangelical, but glad if I've made at least one convert!
I liked Rings of Power a lot. Am I alone here?
First of all, the elements we can all agree on? There’s nothing wrong with the excellent soundtrack and score, use of music and sound was good. And the Title Sequence is quite excellent too. I enjoyed the visual spectacle - the hidden Hobbit village coming alive was very good.
Pacing we could argue over. I thought the first episode had a good pace. There was discussion here last week, horror tales tend be short, if it’s long then it becomes more than horror - similar here in that making Rings of Power have pace, action and suspense it has to move away from pure Tolkienism - indeed hiding from, and the battle with the big Orc, sequence Spielberg would have been proud of.
And whilst some of the script was a little lame, some performances were very good. Markella Kavenagh steals acting honours as adventurous Hobbit Nori - Ismael Córdova as buttoned up Elf Arondir likeable too.
Too early to say about Characterisation just two episodes in. Accents. Maybe a bit like Derry Girls doing Midsummer Nights Dream at times?
If Tolkien purists were to argue it’s not true to Tolkien enough, I would argue it builds upon what Tolkien offered, mankind fighting for Morgoth so held in suspicion for example. For purists I’m reminded about what Stu from Romford said about ism’s earlier today. How do the purists know that the man himself wouldn’t watch this and enjoy it?
Loved Galadriel’s warrior eye make up when she took down the troll, I’m going to do mine like that. 😍
You're also the only remaining fan of Yorkshire County Cricket Club. That's a warning light about your judgment
What would Tolkien have thought? Well, there are a couple of answers to that. First of all, he really hated people making changes to his ideas. In fact he vetoed several possible film productions of the Lord of the rings because they wanted to alter plot points, commenting, 'I don't mind people leaving things out, but I wish they wouldn't change things.' Therefore, we can probably say that he would be pretty pissed off with what's been done here in terms of his Legendarium.
However, there is another side to this. The character of Galadriel in particular changed a great deal as he was writing about her. So, for example, in the fellowship of the ring she describes herself as having passed over the mountains of the fall of Nargothrond or Gondolin to join Celeborn who is that point appears to have been a Nandorin elf. However by the time he wrote the appendices he changed his mind and Celeborn and Galadriel ran the kingdom of south Lindon for many years after the end of the second age having met in Doriath.
Yet another version of her backstory in unfinished tales shows her and Celeborn as the Lord and Lady of Eregion having founded it sometime after the end of the first stage.
Now, anyone of these could make an excellent story which makes it deeply puzzling that the writers have decided to ditch the whole bloody lot and come up with something totally different but wildly inconsistent with the texts and in fact not very convincing on the first couple of episodes.
Which is roughly why I'm not very impressed with them.
The thing is: I really don't care what Tolkien would have thought. I want an entertaining story, well told. Perhaps there were reasons for the changes; perhaps not. It's a series *inspired* by his writing, not a word-for-word reciting of the story.
In the same way the TV series 'Elementary' had very little connection with Conan Doyle's stories, but was still far more faithful than the BBC's Sherlock.
Perhaps. But so far, I haven't found this especially entertaining. Certainly less so than any of the ideas they could have picked up and run with from Tolkien's writing.
I've watched an episode and a half. It's unlikely I'll watch the rest.
It's not entertaining? Then it's like the Silmarillion. Or even LotR.
If you don't like either of them, then why are you even watching it?
I wonder why Father Calv crowbarred paedophillia into a tweet about transgender issues?
Only joking, I know exactly why he did!
Actually there is genuine concern about why some people may be keen to encourage the use of puberty blockers. It is worthy of consideration.
Genuine concerns about x, words to define the age we live in.
I know we don't see eye to eye on much UD, but Babylon Berlin is utterly FAB and thanks again for the recommendation.
👍 Cool. I admit to have becoming totally fanboi about the series to the point of being evangelical, but glad if I've made at least one convert!
I liked Rings of Power a lot. Am I alone here?
First of all, the elements we can all agree on? There’s nothing wrong with the excellent soundtrack and score, use of music and sound was good. And the Title Sequence is quite excellent too. I enjoyed the visual spectacle - the hidden Hobbit village coming alive was very good.
Pacing we could argue over. I thought the first episode had a good pace. There was discussion here last week, horror tales tend be short, if it’s long then it becomes more than horror - similar here in that making Rings of Power have pace, action and suspense it has to move away from pure Tolkienism - indeed hiding from, and the battle with the big Orc, sequence Spielberg would have been proud of.
And whilst some of the script was a little lame, some performances were very good. Markella Kavenagh steals acting honours as adventurous Hobbit Nori - Ismael Córdova as buttoned up Elf Arondir likeable too.
Too early to say about Characterisation just two episodes in. Accents. Maybe a bit like Derry Girls doing Midsummer Nights Dream at times?
If Tolkien purists were to argue it’s not true to Tolkien enough, I would argue it builds upon what Tolkien offered, mankind fighting for Morgoth so held in suspicion for example. For purists I’m reminded about what Stu from Romford said about ism’s earlier today. How do the purists know that the man himself wouldn’t watch this and enjoy it?
Loved Galadriel’s warrior eye make up when she took down the troll, I’m going to do mine like that. 😍
You're also the only remaining fan of Yorkshire County Cricket Club. That's a warning light about your judgment
What would Tolkien have thought? Well, there are a couple of answers to that. First of all, he really hated people making changes to his ideas. In fact he vetoed several possible film productions of the Lord of the rings because they wanted to alter plot points, commenting, 'I don't mind people leaving things out, but I wish they wouldn't change things.' Therefore, we can probably say that he would be pretty pissed off with what's been done here in terms of his Legendarium.
However, there is another side to this. The character of Galadriel in particular changed a great deal as he was writing about her. So, for example, in the fellowship of the ring she describes herself as having passed over the mountains of the fall of Nargothrond or Gondolin to join Celeborn who is that point appears to have been a Nandorin elf. However by the time he wrote the appendices he changed his mind and Celeborn and Galadriel ran the kingdom of south Lindon for many years after the end of the second age having met in Doriath.
Yet another version of her backstory in unfinished tales shows her and Celeborn as the Lord and Lady of Eregion having founded it sometime after the end of the first stage.
Now, anyone of these could make an excellent story which makes it deeply puzzling that the writers have decided to ditch the whole bloody lot and come up with something totally different but wildly inconsistent with the texts and in fact not very convincing on the first couple of episodes.
Which is roughly why I'm not very impressed with them.
The thing is: I really don't care what Tolkien would have thought. I want an entertaining story, well told. Perhaps there were reasons for the changes; perhaps not. It's a series *inspired* by his writing, not a word-for-word reciting of the story.
In the same way the TV series 'Elementary' had very little connection with Conan Doyle's stories, but was still far more faithful than the BBC's Sherlock.
Perhaps. But so far, I haven't found this especially entertaining. Certainly less so than any of the ideas they could have picked up and run with from Tolkien's writing.
I've watched an episode and a half. It's unlikely I'll watch the rest.
It's not entertaining? Then it's like the Silmarillion. Or even LotR.
If you don't like either of them, then why are you even watching it?
I didn't say I didn't like LotR: just that it's not massively entertaining - to me, at least. There's some brilliant world-building and characters, but a much better storyteller could have taken his worlds and characters and written more entertaining prose. And told the same stories in half the words...
I wonder why Father Calv crowbarred paedophillia into a tweet about transgender issues?
Only joking, I know exactly why he did!
Actually there is genuine concern about why some people may be keen to encourage the use of puberty blockers. It is worthy of consideration.
Genuine concerns about x, words to define the age we live in.
I know we don't see eye to eye on much UD, but Babylon Berlin is utterly FAB and thanks again for the recommendation.
👍 Cool. I admit to have becoming totally fanboi about the series to the point of being evangelical, but glad if I've made at least one convert!
I liked Rings of Power a lot. Am I alone here?
First of all, the elements we can all agree on? There’s nothing wrong with the excellent soundtrack and score, use of music and sound was good. And the Title Sequence is quite excellent too. I enjoyed the visual spectacle - the hidden Hobbit village coming alive was very good.
Pacing we could argue over. I thought the first episode had a good pace. There was discussion here last week, horror tales tend be short, if it’s long then it becomes more than horror - similar here in that making Rings of Power have pace, action and suspense it has to move away from pure Tolkienism - indeed hiding from, and the battle with the big Orc, sequence Spielberg would have been proud of.
And whilst some of the script was a little lame, some performances were very good. Markella Kavenagh steals acting honours as adventurous Hobbit Nori - Ismael Córdova as buttoned up Elf Arondir likeable too.
Too early to say about Characterisation just two episodes in. Accents. Maybe a bit like Derry Girls doing Midsummer Nights Dream at times?
If Tolkien purists were to argue it’s not true to Tolkien enough, I would argue it builds upon what Tolkien offered, mankind fighting for Morgoth so held in suspicion for example. For purists I’m reminded about what Stu from Romford said about ism’s earlier today. How do the purists know that the man himself wouldn’t watch this and enjoy it?
Loved Galadriel’s warrior eye make up when she took down the troll, I’m going to do mine like that. 😍
You're also the only remaining fan of Yorkshire County Cricket Club. That's a warning light about your judgment
What would Tolkien have thought? Well, there are a couple of answers to that. First of all, he really hated people making changes to his ideas. In fact he vetoed several possible film productions of the Lord of the rings because they wanted to alter plot points, commenting, 'I don't mind people leaving things out, but I wish they wouldn't change things.' Therefore, we can probably say that he would be pretty pissed off with what's been done here in terms of his Legendarium.
However, there is another side to this. The character of Galadriel in particular changed a great deal as he was writing about her. So, for example, in the fellowship of the ring she describes herself as having passed over the mountains of the fall of Nargothrond or Gondolin to join Celeborn who is that point appears to have been a Nandorin elf. However by the time he wrote the appendices he changed his mind and Celeborn and Galadriel ran the kingdom of south Lindon for many years after the end of the second age having met in Doriath.
Yet another version of her backstory in unfinished tales shows her and Celeborn as the Lord and Lady of Eregion having founded it sometime after the end of the first stage.
Now, anyone of these could make an excellent story which makes it deeply puzzling that the writers have decided to ditch the whole bloody lot and come up with something totally different but wildly inconsistent with the texts and in fact not very convincing on the first couple of episodes.
Which is roughly why I'm not very impressed with them.
The thing is: I really don't care what Tolkien would have thought. I want an entertaining story, well told. Perhaps there were reasons for the changes; perhaps not. It's a series *inspired* by his writing, not a word-for-word reciting of the story.
In the same way the TV series 'Elementary' had very little connection with Conan Doyle's stories, but was still far more faithful than the BBC's Sherlock.
Perhaps. But so far, I haven't found this especially entertaining. Certainly less so than any of the ideas they could have picked up and run with from Tolkien's writing.
I've watched an episode and a half. It's unlikely I'll watch the rest.
It's not entertaining? Then it's like the Silmarillion. Or even LotR.
If you don't like either of them, then why are you even watching it?
I didn't say I didn't like LotR: just that it's not massively entertaining - to me, at least. There's some brilliant world-building and characters, but a much better storyteller could have taken his worlds and characters and written more entertaining prose. And told the same stories in half the words...
The characters? Really? The ones that change from chapter to chapter according to the needs of the plot, or the ones that only appear in one chapter?
It's the plot and the setting that are key. Lose those, and the whole thing vanishes.
The adaptations invariably lose 50% of it. This one is no exception.
I wonder why Father Calv crowbarred paedophillia into a tweet about transgender issues?
Only joking, I know exactly why he did!
Actually there is genuine concern about why some people may be keen to encourage the use of puberty blockers. It is worthy of consideration.
Genuine concerns about x, words to define the age we live in.
I know we don't see eye to eye on much UD, but Babylon Berlin is utterly FAB and thanks again for the recommendation.
👍 Cool. I admit to have becoming totally fanboi about the series to the point of being evangelical, but glad if I've made at least one convert!
I liked Rings of Power a lot. Am I alone here?
First of all, the elements we can all agree on? There’s nothing wrong with the excellent soundtrack and score, use of music and sound was good. And the Title Sequence is quite excellent too. I enjoyed the visual spectacle - the hidden Hobbit village coming alive was very good.
Pacing we could argue over. I thought the first episode had a good pace. There was discussion here last week, horror tales tend be short, if it’s long then it becomes more than horror - similar here in that making Rings of Power have pace, action and suspense it has to move away from pure Tolkienism - indeed hiding from, and the battle with the big Orc, sequence Spielberg would have been proud of.
And whilst some of the script was a little lame, some performances were very good. Markella Kavenagh steals acting honours as adventurous Hobbit Nori - Ismael Córdova as buttoned up Elf Arondir likeable too.
Too early to say about Characterisation just two episodes in. Accents. Maybe a bit like Derry Girls doing Midsummer Nights Dream at times?
If Tolkien purists were to argue it’s not true to Tolkien enough, I would argue it builds upon what Tolkien offered, mankind fighting for Morgoth so held in suspicion for example. For purists I’m reminded about what Stu from Romford said about ism’s earlier today. How do the purists know that the man himself wouldn’t watch this and enjoy it?
Loved Galadriel’s warrior eye make up when she took down the troll, I’m going to do mine like that. 😍
You're also the only remaining fan of Yorkshire County Cricket Club. That's a warning light about your judgment
What would Tolkien have thought? Well, there are a couple of answers to that. First of all, he really hated people making changes to his ideas. In fact he vetoed several possible film productions of the Lord of the rings because they wanted to alter plot points, commenting, 'I don't mind people leaving things out, but I wish they wouldn't change things.' Therefore, we can probably say that he would be pretty pissed off with what's been done here in terms of his Legendarium.
However, there is another side to this. The character of Galadriel in particular changed a great deal as he was writing about her. So, for example, in the fellowship of the ring she describes herself as having passed over the mountains of the fall of Nargothrond or Gondolin to join Celeborn who is that point appears to have been a Nandorin elf. However by the time he wrote the appendices he changed his mind and Celeborn and Galadriel ran the kingdom of south Lindon for many years after the end of the second age having met in Doriath.
Yet another version of her backstory in unfinished tales shows her and Celeborn as the Lord and Lady of Eregion having founded it sometime after the end of the first stage.
Now, anyone of these could make an excellent story which makes it deeply puzzling that the writers have decided to ditch the whole bloody lot and come up with something totally different but wildly inconsistent with the texts and in fact not very convincing on the first couple of episodes.
Which is roughly why I'm not very impressed with them.
The thing is: I really don't care what Tolkien would have thought. I want an entertaining story, well told. Perhaps there were reasons for the changes; perhaps not. It's a series *inspired* by his writing, not a word-for-word reciting of the story.
In the same way the TV series 'Elementary' had very little connection with Conan Doyle's stories, but was still far more faithful than the BBC's Sherlock.
Perhaps. But so far, I haven't found this especially entertaining. Certainly less so than any of the ideas they could have picked up and run with from Tolkien's writing.
I've watched an episode and a half. It's unlikely I'll watch the rest.
What’s all this I’m missing? I only popped on for the Opinium.
“ You're also the only remaining fan of Yorkshire County Cricket Club. That's a warning light about your judgment “
Who woke you up grumpy old Gandalf. 🤣.
Well I’m enjoying how they have made it suspenseful, mysterious and a visual and auditory charm to wallow in. And that’s even before the characters and storyline builds.
Most of Tolkiens work is a historical and mythical mishmash anyway, hardly original with so much copied from the Edda and then changed to be or mean something else, so Tolkien purists can’t be too Poe faced about the effort put in here in my honest opinion.
I hereby inaugurate the annual @Dura_Ace Hydraulic Stamp Trophy, given to the commenter who manages to comment despite being significantly injured or severely ill as he or she types. Bonus points for the most spectacular injuries or incapacitation
Anyone who actually dies while commenting gets a Lifetime Achievement Award
Latest Sifo poll in Sweden has the centre-right bloc on 49.8% and the centre-left parties on 48.5%.
Still looking like a dead heat though slight edge to the four party centre-right bloc - Sweden Democrats on 20.1%, Moderates on 17.3%.
You'll summon Stuart Dickson to debunk the idea of a centre-right bloc again.
The problem is if the Sweden Democrats poll more than the Moderates they might not unreasonably expect to lead the Government with their leader as Prime Minister.
What I don't know is, if they try that, whether the Moderates and/or Liberals will jump ship. The other option is the Sweden Democrats accept a Moderate Prime Minister in exchange for some key Cabinet posts.
Those Russian talking heads are now suggesting that the gulag be brought back. It’s not so bad, they say, because unlike Auschwitz at least the guards knew your name.
I am normally excellent at predicting this one. I reckon despite other conventional polls showing Tory’s drifting, this poll will close the gap 38 to 33, correcting too low Con swingback score last time and likely waking BJO up. 🙂.
I wonder why Father Calv crowbarred paedophillia into a tweet about transgender issues?
Only joking, I know exactly why he did!
Actually there is genuine concern about why some people may be keen to encourage the use of puberty blockers. It is worthy of consideration.
Genuine concerns about x, words to define the age we live in.
I know we don't see eye to eye on much UD, but Babylon Berlin is utterly FAB and thanks again for the recommendation.
👍 Cool. I admit to have becoming totally fanboi about the series to the point of being evangelical, but glad if I've made at least one convert!
I liked Rings of Power a lot. Am I alone here?
First of all, the elements we can all agree on? There’s nothing wrong with the excellent soundtrack and score, use of music and sound was good. And the Title Sequence is quite excellent too. I enjoyed the visual spectacle - the hidden Hobbit village coming alive was very good.
Pacing we could argue over. I thought the first episode had a good pace. There was discussion here last week, horror tales tend be short, if it’s long then it becomes more than horror - similar here in that making Rings of Power have pace, action and suspense it has to move away from pure Tolkienism - indeed hiding from, and the battle with the big Orc, sequence Spielberg would have been proud of.
And whilst some of the script was a little lame, some performances were very good. Markella Kavenagh steals acting honours as adventurous Hobbit Nori - Ismael Córdova as buttoned up Elf Arondir likeable too.
Too early to say about Characterisation just two episodes in. Accents. Maybe a bit like Derry Girls doing Midsummer Nights Dream at times?
If Tolkien purists were to argue it’s not true to Tolkien enough, I would argue it builds upon what Tolkien offered, mankind fighting for Morgoth so held in suspicion for example. For purists I’m reminded about what Stu from Romford said about ism’s earlier today. How do the purists know that the man himself wouldn’t watch this and enjoy it?
Loved Galadriel’s warrior eye make up when she took down the troll, I’m going to do mine like that. 😍
You're also the only remaining fan of Yorkshire County Cricket Club. That's a warning light about your judgment
What would Tolkien have thought? Well, there are a couple of answers to that. First of all, he really hated people making changes to his ideas. In fact he vetoed several possible film productions of the Lord of the rings because they wanted to alter plot points, commenting, 'I don't mind people leaving things out, but I wish they wouldn't change things.' Therefore, we can probably say that he would be pretty pissed off with what's been done here in terms of his Legendarium.
However, there is another side to this. The character of Galadriel in particular changed a great deal as he was writing about her. So, for example, in the fellowship of the ring she describes herself as having passed over the mountains of the fall of Nargothrond or Gondolin to join Celeborn who is that point appears to have been a Nandorin elf. However by the time he wrote the appendices he changed his mind and Celeborn and Galadriel ran the kingdom of south Lindon for many years after the end of the second age having met in Doriath.
Yet another version of her backstory in unfinished tales shows her and Celeborn as the Lord and Lady of Eregion having founded it sometime after the end of the first stage.
Now, anyone of these could make an excellent story which makes it deeply puzzling that the writers have decided to ditch the whole bloody lot and come up with something totally different but wildly inconsistent with the texts and in fact not very convincing on the first couple of episodes.
Which is roughly why I'm not very impressed with them.
The thing is: I really don't care what Tolkien would have thought. I want an entertaining story, well told. Perhaps there were reasons for the changes; perhaps not. It's a series *inspired* by his writing, not a word-for-word reciting of the story.
In the same way the TV series 'Elementary' had very little connection with Conan Doyle's stories, but was still far more faithful than the BBC's Sherlock.
Perhaps. But so far, I haven't found this especially entertaining. Certainly less so than any of the ideas they could have picked up and run with from Tolkien's writing.
I've watched an episode and a half. It's unlikely I'll watch the rest.
I put it on earlier today to get a feel for it. Someone started speaking “elvish” from the beginning and no subtitles. Was v annoyed no subtitles. Then I suddenly realised it was a glitch in my fire stick where ever since watching a couple of Hindi language films my fire stick keeps showing “Hindi subtitles not available” whatever I put on. Switched to English and all was fine and back to the glory days of the empire.
Not sure what it says about me that I thought Hindi was Elvish but there you go.
Latest Sifo poll in Sweden has the centre-right bloc on 49.8% and the centre-left parties on 48.5%.
Still looking like a dead heat though slight edge to the four party centre-right bloc - Sweden Democrats on 20.1%, Moderates on 17.3%.
You'll summon Stuart Dickson to debunk the idea of a centre-right bloc again.
The problem is if the Sweden Democrats poll more than the Moderates they might not unreasonably expect to lead the Government with their leader as Prime Minister.
What I don't know is, if they try that, whether the Moderates and/or Liberals will jump ship. The other option is the Sweden Democrats accept a Moderate Prime Minister in exchange for some key Cabinet posts.
Not necessarily. In the Danish election about 10 years ago the far-right party got more votes than the centre-right party. As a bloc they won the election, and the centre-right party led the government nonetheless. The far-right didn't take any cabinet positions if I remember correctly.
AI that can see pain in a mouse's face could aid drug development
A new artificial intelligence that monitors mice grimaces to score their pain from 0 to 8 may help researchers judge the effectiveness of a new pain-relieving treatment
Well fuck that. I realise this is not AI in any interesting sense. But if they do get sentient we'll have given them some useful hints about the use of inferior life forms
I wonder why Father Calv crowbarred paedophillia into a tweet about transgender issues?
Only joking, I know exactly why he did!
Actually there is genuine concern about why some people may be keen to encourage the use of puberty blockers. It is worthy of consideration.
Genuine concerns about x, words to define the age we live in.
I know we don't see eye to eye on much UD, but Babylon Berlin is utterly FAB and thanks again for the recommendation.
👍 Cool. I admit to have becoming totally fanboi about the series to the point of being evangelical, but glad if I've made at least one convert!
I liked Rings of Power a lot. Am I alone here?
First of all, the elements we can all agree on? There’s nothing wrong with the excellent soundtrack and score, use of music and sound was good. And the Title Sequence is quite excellent too. I enjoyed the visual spectacle - the hidden Hobbit village coming alive was very good.
Pacing we could argue over. I thought the first episode had a good pace. There was discussion here last week, horror tales tend be short, if it’s long then it becomes more than horror - similar here in that making Rings of Power have pace, action and suspense it has to move away from pure Tolkienism - indeed hiding from, and the battle with the big Orc, sequence Spielberg would have been proud of.
And whilst some of the script was a little lame, some performances were very good. Markella Kavenagh steals acting honours as adventurous Hobbit Nori - Ismael Córdova as buttoned up Elf Arondir likeable too.
Too early to say about Characterisation just two episodes in. Accents. Maybe a bit like Derry Girls doing Midsummer Nights Dream at times?
If Tolkien purists were to argue it’s not true to Tolkien enough, I would argue it builds upon what Tolkien offered, mankind fighting for Morgoth so held in suspicion for example. For purists I’m reminded about what Stu from Romford said about ism’s earlier today. How do the purists know that the man himself wouldn’t watch this and enjoy it?
Loved Galadriel’s warrior eye make up when she took down the troll, I’m going to do mine like that. 😍
You're also the only remaining fan of Yorkshire County Cricket Club. That's a warning light about your judgment
What would Tolkien have thought? Well, there are a couple of answers to that. First of all, he really hated people making changes to his ideas. In fact he vetoed several possible film productions of the Lord of the rings because they wanted to alter plot points, commenting, 'I don't mind people leaving things out, but I wish they wouldn't change things.' Therefore, we can probably say that he would be pretty pissed off with what's been done here in terms of his Legendarium.
However, there is another side to this. The character of Galadriel in particular changed a great deal as he was writing about her. So, for example, in the fellowship of the ring she describes herself as having passed over the mountains of the fall of Nargothrond or Gondolin to join Celeborn who is that point appears to have been a Nandorin elf. However by the time he wrote the appendices he changed his mind and Celeborn and Galadriel ran the kingdom of south Lindon for many years after the end of the second age having met in Doriath.
Yet another version of her backstory in unfinished tales shows her and Celeborn as the Lord and Lady of Eregion having founded it sometime after the end of the first stage.
Now, anyone of these could make an excellent story which makes it deeply puzzling that the writers have decided to ditch the whole bloody lot and come up with something totally different but wildly inconsistent with the texts and in fact not very convincing on the first couple of episodes.
Which is roughly why I'm not very impressed with them.
The thing is: I really don't care what Tolkien would have thought. I want an entertaining story, well told. Perhaps there were reasons for the changes; perhaps not. It's a series *inspired* by his writing, not a word-for-word reciting of the story.
In the same way the TV series 'Elementary' had very little connection with Conan Doyle's stories, but was still far more faithful than the BBC's Sherlock.
Perhaps. But so far, I haven't found this especially entertaining. Certainly less so than any of the ideas they could have picked up and run with from Tolkien's writing.
I've watched an episode and a half. It's unlikely I'll watch the rest.
I put it on earlier today to get a feel for it. Someone started speaking “elvish” from the beginning and no subtitles. Was v annoyed no subtitles. Then I suddenly realised it was a glitch in my fire stick where ever since watching a couple of Hindi language films my fire stick keeps showing “Hindi subtitles not available” whatever I put on. Switched to English and all was fine and back to the glory days of the empire.
Not sure what it says about me that I thought Hindi was Elvish but there you go.
Look. Don’t upset him. 🧝♀️
Because that’s my job
From 12 onward, Gandalf is actually Edda dwarf name, lazy old Tolkien.
The Times reports that Truss is planning a bonfire of employee rights legislation under new Business Secretary Jacob Rees-Mogg.
“One Conservative source said that Boris Johnson vetoed (previous) plans because they would have gone against his pledge in the Brexit referendum not to strip workers of rights, but Truss was not bound by such pledges.”
Latest Sifo poll in Sweden has the centre-right bloc on 49.8% and the centre-left parties on 48.5%.
Still looking like a dead heat though slight edge to the four party centre-right bloc - Sweden Democrats on 20.1%, Moderates on 17.3%.
You'll summon Stuart Dickson to debunk the idea of a centre-right bloc again.
The problem is if the Sweden Democrats poll more than the Moderates they might not unreasonably expect to lead the Government with their leader as Prime Minister.
What I don't know is, if they try that, whether the Moderates and/or Liberals will jump ship. The other option is the Sweden Democrats accept a Moderate Prime Minister in exchange for some key Cabinet posts.
Either way the Social Democrats would be unable to form a government again unless one of the Moderates or Liberals joined them, though the Moderates could form a government with Sweden Democrat support even if neither the Social Democrats or Moderates agreed to a Sweden Democrat PM
I am normally excellent at predicting this one. I reckon despite other conventional polls showing Tory’s drifting, this poll will close the gap 38 to 33, correcting too low Con swingback score last time and likely waking BJO up. 🙂.
Its 4 points Rabbit, 38 34
Con 34% (+3) Lab 38% (-1) Lib Dem 12% (+2) Green 6% (-1)
I wonder why Father Calv crowbarred paedophillia into a tweet about transgender issues?
Only joking, I know exactly why he did!
Actually there is genuine concern about why some people may be keen to encourage the use of puberty blockers. It is worthy of consideration.
Genuine concerns about x, words to define the age we live in.
I know we don't see eye to eye on much UD, but Babylon Berlin is utterly FAB and thanks again for the recommendation.
👍 Cool. I admit to have becoming totally fanboi about the series to the point of being evangelical, but glad if I've made at least one convert!
I liked Rings of Power a lot. Am I alone here?
First of all, the elements we can all agree on? There’s nothing wrong with the excellent soundtrack and score, use of music and sound was good. And the Title Sequence is quite excellent too. I enjoyed the visual spectacle - the hidden Hobbit village coming alive was very good.
Pacing we could argue over. I thought the first episode had a good pace. There was discussion here last week, horror tales tend be short, if it’s long then it becomes more than horror - similar here in that making Rings of Power have pace, action and suspense it has to move away from pure Tolkienism - indeed hiding from, and the battle with the big Orc, sequence Spielberg would have been proud of.
And whilst some of the script was a little lame, some performances were very good. Markella Kavenagh steals acting honours as adventurous Hobbit Nori - Ismael Córdova as buttoned up Elf Arondir likeable too.
Too early to say about Characterisation just two episodes in. Accents. Maybe a bit like Derry Girls doing Midsummer Nights Dream at times?
If Tolkien purists were to argue it’s not true to Tolkien enough, I would argue it builds upon what Tolkien offered, mankind fighting for Morgoth so held in suspicion for example. For purists I’m reminded about what Stu from Romford said about ism’s earlier today. How do the purists know that the man himself wouldn’t watch this and enjoy it?
Loved Galadriel’s warrior eye make up when she took down the troll, I’m going to do mine like that. 😍
You're also the only remaining fan of Yorkshire County Cricket Club. That's a warning light about your judgment
What would Tolkien have thought? Well, there are a couple of answers to that. First of all, he really hated people making changes to his ideas. In fact he vetoed several possible film productions of the Lord of the rings because they wanted to alter plot points, commenting, 'I don't mind people leaving things out, but I wish they wouldn't change things.' Therefore, we can probably say that he would be pretty pissed off with what's been done here in terms of his Legendarium.
However, there is another side to this. The character of Galadriel in particular changed a great deal as he was writing about her. So, for example, in the fellowship of the ring she describes herself as having passed over the mountains of the fall of Nargothrond or Gondolin to join Celeborn who is that point appears to have been a Nandorin elf. However by the time he wrote the appendices he changed his mind and Celeborn and Galadriel ran the kingdom of south Lindon for many years after the end of the second age having met in Doriath.
Yet another version of her backstory in unfinished tales shows her and Celeborn as the Lord and Lady of Eregion having founded it sometime after the end of the first stage.
Now, anyone of these could make an excellent story which makes it deeply puzzling that the writers have decided to ditch the whole bloody lot and come up with something totally different but wildly inconsistent with the texts and in fact not very convincing on the first couple of episodes.
Which is roughly why I'm not very impressed with them.
Well there is a reason they didn't go with one of these. They only had the rights to LOTRs and the appendices no other books. So they had to go another direction.
Times also reports, separately, that officials are planning on the assumption that Truss can only rely on a majority of 10, given likely dissent on the backbenches.
I am normally excellent at predicting this one. I reckon despite other conventional polls showing Tory’s drifting, this poll will close the gap 38 to 33, correcting too low Con swingback score last time and likely waking BJO up. 🙂.
I am normally excellent at predicting this one. I reckon despite other conventional polls showing Tory’s drifting, this poll will close the gap 38 to 33, correcting too low Con swingback score last time and likely waking BJO up. 🙂.
Its 4 points Rabbit, 38 34
Con 34% (+3) Lab 38% (-1) Lib Dem 12% (+2) Green 6% (-1)
Oh, well. No Tory poll leads for very nearly NINE MONTHS!
Times also reports, separately, that officials are planning on the assumption that Truss can only rely on a majority of 10, given likely dissent on the backbenches.
What's it got to do with officials, unless it means Conservative Party officials.
These guys are volunteers and know what they are doing. Mountains need to be taken seriously.
Hmm! Glad to see they like best a map and OS reference. Despite the collective wisdom of much of PB.
Christ, not this again.
hedgehog.pig.toad is susceptible to about 10 errors (plurals, big for pig, towed). gridref 342546 is susceptible to 900,000 errors because no combination of 6 digits is "not a real number." It is not controversial which is the better way of communicating a position. If Keswick Mountain Rescue Team are too thick to recognise this I must remember not to get lost in Keswick.
They're volunteers. They are very good at what they do. Sometimes they get horribly injured trying to rescue people who don't listen to their advice.
Edit: indeed they mention the app I use, which is exactly the same as what3words but works for Mountain Rescue. OS locate.
Yes their bravery is not in question, but that is not the point. It's a story about not just reading a position off a phone, dressed up as a story about one phone based system being better than another when it patently isn't. And if what3words doesn't "work for them" they need to retire as being not fit for purpose.
The story was that the what3words location was communicated incorrectly but was close enough to be a credible location. And this is happening regularly, so something is going badly wrong.
Why? Dunno. But I'd listen to the the poor people having to put up with it.
Back when I worked in the oil industry, the idiot who had created the internal company catalogue of stuff hadn’t put any error checking in the codes. So basically any 5 (I think it was five) digit number would get you *something*.
So a photocopier was 1 digit from being a large piece of drilling equipment….
I hereby inaugurate the annual @Dura_Ace Hydraulic Stamp Trophy, given to the commenter who manages to comment despite being significantly injured or severely ill as he or she types. Bonus points for the most spectacular injuries or incapacitation
Anyone who actually dies while commenting gets a Lifetime Achievement Award
I am normally excellent at predicting this one. I reckon despite other conventional polls showing Tory’s drifting, this poll will close the gap 38 to 33, correcting too low Con swingback score last time and likely waking BJO up. 🙂.
Its 4 points Rabbit, 38 34
Con 34% (+3) Lab 38% (-1) Lib Dem 12% (+2) Green 6% (-1)
She was pretty close, though. Well done, @MoonRabbit!
I think "slashed" is overdoing it a wee bit. Labour's rating is down a point so the Conservative and Liberal Democrat gains have come from the "Others" vote which will be down by two or three points.
All pretty meaningless at this time - the Conservative leadership battle has continued to dominate the headlines even during the political "quiet" period. What will be interesting is how the public view the initial pronouncements from the Truss administration early next week.
The Times reports that Truss is planning a bonfire of employee rights legislation under new Business Secretary Jacob Rees-Mogg.
“One Conservative source said that Boris Johnson vetoed (previous) plans because they would have gone against his pledge in the Brexit referendum not to strip workers of rights, but Truss was not bound by such pledges.”
Now that the majority of Conservative voters are retired, workers rights no longer matter.
Times also reports, separately, that officials are planning on the assumption that Truss can only rely on a majority of 10, given likely dissent on the backbenches.
Nah, it’s like footballl. The “supporters” can boo and gripe about their team or manager but then when the opposition attacks they pile in behind.
Like Villa v Coty tonight - all the Villa fans wanting a Gerard gone but they get a surprise performance and they are roaring the team on.
We saw it with the Shagger even towards the end that when Labour attacked they all rallied round.
Maybe best to let Truss hang herself in the Westminster bubble but focus attacks outside that space. Don’t give the Tories any hook to hang support on.
Those Russian talking heads are now suggesting that the gulag be brought back. It’s not so bad, they say, because unlike Auschwitz at least the guards knew your name.
According to some elderly relatives who were in German concentration camps, getting to know the guards was vital. Some had humane impulses and would provide people with food, or tell them what line not to be in. Others….
A Truss government to introduce a new Referendum Act requiring half the Scottish electorate not just a majority to vote for independence before it would be allowed. 60% of Scots too would have to back indyref2 in polls consistently for a year before the UK government would even consider allowing it
Comments
It's very apparent from numerous stories, and my own anecdotal experience, that is far from universal.
FWIW, I've recent experience of two hospitals locally. One is good; the other quite the opposite* (which is where my father's story took place).
The surprising thing about the Guardian story is that it happened in a centre of excellence. Which takes us back to your comments.
*Note even the bad places can have some excellent professionals working in them.
https://isleofwightwebcams.co.uk/webcams/solent-view/
It looks like they've turned the tracking off on the carrier itself, no update for two hours from its anchored position on the marine traffic app, but you can see the tugs.
It does leave a slightly sour taste when a driver gets pole thanks to his team mate's mistake impeding the rest.
https://twitter.com/RhonddaBryant/status/1565962487425548289
https://mobile.twitter.com/EuromaidanPress/status/1566063473162915845
In Twitter flash mob, famous ppl and companies publish one word. UA President Zelenskyy joined it with the word "Freedom," Boris Johnson tweeted "Ukraine", Joe Biden tweeted "democracy"
Flash mob was started by American railway company that accidentally posted word "trains"
https://blogs.nasa.gov/artemis/2022/09/03/artemis-i-launch-attempt-scrubbed/
One of the things that people really misunderstand, is that they think "those Germans get all their gas from Russia, they're going to get fucked, while us Brits who don't are going to be fine."
Unless you have gas on long-term supply contracts (and most UK gas is not on long-term supply contracts), then you are going to be paying the world market price for that gas. And that world market price is suddenly going to be driven by the Germans bidding on every LNG cargo out there.
Worldwide, the only people who aren't seeing surging gas prices are those people who have domestic gas production, but no way to export it. And that's a pretty small list of countries. (And, by the way, it also misses something else: if your energy is cheap, and other peoples' energy is expensive, then suddenly lots of energy intensive activities will take place in your country, driving up the price of power. Think steel mini mills and aluminium smelters.)
Basically: when you remove a large chunk of gas supply, pretty much everybody has to cut back usage.
And that's why subsidies alone aren't the solution. We can't all subsidise ourselves out of trouble, because those subsidies don't magic gas into existence.
https://cumbriacrack.com/2022/08/30/lake-district-mountain-rescue-team-warning-over-what3words/
These guys are volunteers and know what they are doing. Mountains need to be taken seriously.
Patchiness isn't unique to Britain, of course and by many anecdotes is often worse in private healthcare systems. The collaborative way of working in the NHS is both a drag on innovation and an early warning sign of poor practice. In private systems specialists are often reluctant to refer on complications as it effects their own reputation.
Not all that knowledge gets acted on though. It is often difficult for the Medical Directors team to get robust enough evidence to take a case forward.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7v6KTzhzCC8
A 2-minute comedy video for those who have been following the leadership campaign.
@AWeissmann_
·
2h
Breaking: Opening statement at FLA hearing by Trump counsel abandons defense that docs were all planted, admitting that case is largely about govt papers in Trump’s possession.
Jeremy Hunt's book Zero is about eliminating avoidable errors from the NHS (and parts give an insight into where he went wrong as SoS for Health).
OT but interesting (if with some inadvertent Saturday pm light relief in the way of the Graun's Scottish expertise, and their idea of the contents of Meg Dods' Cookbook).
'The project’s lead, Dr Alberto Fiore, a professor of food chemistry and technology at Abertay University in Dundee, said Zimbabweans rely heavily on maize, which is low in protein, essential minerals, amino acids and fatty acids.
[...]
Although unwilling to disclose his recipe before the publication of the study’s data, Fiore did say his insect-based porridge contained grains including sorghum and millets. He said he was sure the dish was palatable, with his research team having conducted consumer taste tests in Scotland, a country long associated with porridge.'
hedgehog.pig.toad is susceptible to about 10 errors (plurals, big for pig, towed). gridref 342546 is susceptible to 900,000 errors because no combination of 6 digits is "not a real number." It is not controversial which is the better way of communicating a position. If Keswick Mountain Rescue Team are too thick to recognise this I must remember not to get lost in Keswick.
And you can probably think of many likely consequences of that greater independence for single men.
(*In the first decades of the US Congress, most members lived in boarding houses. Those who lived together tended to vote together.)
https://www.oryxspioenkop.com/2022/02/attack-on-europe-documenting-equipment.html
Which is fine as it is a private company, but I'd be slightly nervous about getting all our emergency services used to using it, only to find the licence fee has gone up, or starts being applied to them. They also have access to all the locations you look up.
https://what3words.com/select-plan?currency=GBP#view-tiers
It really should be open-source, and that's not something I say often.
(Incidentally, one of the word triplets for our house is quite apt. And no, I won't post it...)
Seems like VisitBritain are doing a global campaign, which Mogg has signed off £4m for quite rightly, and DCMS are just trying to get in on the act with a spare £800,000 that they had lying around. Seems like duplication of activity and he's absolutely right to shelve it.
Edit: indeed they mention the app I use, which is exactly the same as what3words but works for Mountain Rescue. OS locate.
Also the rough location in reference to Callander and how far north I was. "I'm based in Sheffield mate, can you download the app?" FFS.
Sadly, there have also been a number of cases of people drowning in the lakes this summer, not realising that swimming in a mountain lake is not like your local pool.
It's all specs and drugs and sausage rolls.
Gets coat.
Why? Dunno. But I'd listen to the the poor people having to put up with it.
Fight
Tight
is in Manchester.
Need I say more?
The sooner everyone in the world downloads the app the quicker and better it will work. Tis that simple
It’s fair to say Truss is a shapeshifter. She fought for Britain to remain in the European Union before becoming a staunch defender of Brexit. Her supporters say she accepted the outcome of the 2016 referendum and got with the program. Others say she’s a weather vane, pivoting when it suits her advancement."
source$: https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/09/03/liz-truss-uk-prime-minister/
(I gather most of you agree with that "serial prevaricator" description of your current prime minister.)
Still looking like a dead heat though slight edge to the four party centre-right bloc - Sweden Democrats on 20.1%, Moderates on 17.3%.
What would Tolkien have thought? Well, there are a couple of answers to that. First of all, he really hated people making changes to his ideas. In fact he vetoed several possible film productions of the Lord of the rings because they wanted to alter plot points, commenting, 'I don't mind people leaving things out, but I wish they wouldn't change things.' Therefore, we can probably say that he would be pretty pissed off with what's been done here in terms of his Legendarium.
However, there is another side to this. The character of Galadriel in particular changed a great deal as he was writing about her. So, for example, in the fellowship of the ring she describes herself as having passed over the mountains of the fall of Nargothrond or Gondolin to join Celeborn who is that point appears to have been a Nandorin elf. However by the time he wrote the appendices he changed his mind and Celeborn and Galadriel ran the kingdom of south Lindon for many years after the end of the second age having met in Doriath.
Yet another version of her backstory in unfinished tales shows her and Celeborn as the Lord and Lady of Eregion having founded it sometime after the end of the first stage.
Now, anyone of these could make an excellent story which makes it deeply puzzling that the writers have decided to ditch the whole bloody lot and come up with something totally different but wildly inconsistent with the texts and in fact not very convincing on the first couple of episodes.
Which is roughly why I'm not very impressed with them.
A sad metaphor for her policies not reaching the hungry this winter or something.
The other event is losing a GE in 2024. By that time, reverting to Johnson will feel quite strange and I'd think the cast of alternative candidates will be greater; conversely, not being in government, they can take as long as they like.
Case 1 is maybe a 20% chance, case 2 more like 5%.
Chechnya's Ramzan Kadyrov says that he has stayed too long as leader and wants to take an indefinite vacation
Not sure if this means he plans to resign but a massive shock given Kadyrov's extensive role in the Ukraine war
https://twitter.com/SamRamani2/status/1566061598007074816
It's a sort of Trump minor. The idea that Trump is the answer to USA leadership is of course nonsense. Past events demonstrate that beyond doubt.
Ditto Boris. The several million Tory voters (like me) who have switched votes or become DKs did so under Boris, and for reasons that won't go away.
The swing voters here are: Tory voters who were Labour till recently; centrist Tories who can't stomach the 'we are the masters now' thing; and centrists who above all want boring competence.
It is very unlikely that Truss is their answer to how to come back to the Tories. Boris is the problem for these groups, not the solution.
None of this counts with Tory members. Bet accordingly.
In the same way the TV series 'Elementary' had very little connection with Conan Doyle's stories, but was still far more faithful than the BBC's Sherlock.
I've watched an episode and a half. It's unlikely I'll watch the rest.
It is one Russian life for every 182x182 meter piece of land captured.
https://twitter.com/DefMon3/status/1566053032101552130
It's the plot and the setting that are key. Lose those, and the whole thing vanishes.
The adaptations invariably lose 50% of it. This one is no exception.
“ You're also the only remaining fan of Yorkshire County Cricket Club. That's a warning light about your judgment “
Who woke you up grumpy old Gandalf. 🤣.
Well I’m enjoying how they have made it suspenseful, mysterious and a visual and auditory charm to wallow in. And that’s even before the characters and storyline builds.
Most of Tolkiens work is a historical and mythical mishmash anyway, hardly original with so much copied from the Edda and then changed to be or mean something else, so Tolkien purists can’t be too Poe faced about the effort put in here in my honest opinion.
What I don't know is, if they try that, whether the Moderates and/or Liberals will jump ship. The other option is the Sweden Democrats accept a Moderate Prime Minister in exchange for some key Cabinet posts.
It’s not so bad, they say, because unlike Auschwitz at least the guards knew your name.
https://twitter.com/avalaina/status/1566113680210665473?s=21&t=U4RVfy7GW0sHBBcWsCmA6Q
Fucking mental.
The last was a shocker, Lab 39 Con 31.
I am normally excellent at predicting this one. I reckon despite other conventional polls showing Tory’s drifting, this poll will close the gap 38 to 33, correcting too low Con swingback score last time and likely waking BJO up. 🙂.
Not sure what it says about me that I thought Hindi was Elvish but there you go.
A new artificial intelligence that monitors mice grimaces to score their pain from 0 to 8 may help researchers judge the effectiveness of a new pain-relieving treatment
https://www.newscientist.com/article/2336250-ai-that-can-see-pain-in-a-mouses-face-could-aid-drug-development/
Well fuck that. I realise this is not AI in any interesting sense. But if they do get sentient we'll have given them some useful hints about the use of inferior life forms
Because that’s my job
From 12 onward, Gandalf is actually Edda dwarf name, lazy old Tolkien.
https://www.sacred-texts.com/neu/poe/poe03.htm
“One Conservative source said that Boris Johnson vetoed (previous) plans because they would have gone against his pledge in the Brexit referendum not to strip workers of rights, but Truss was not bound by such pledges.”
Oh dear, how sad, never mind.
Con 34% (+3)
Lab 38% (-1)
Lib Dem 12% (+2)
Green 6% (-1)
Uh oh. BJO incoming…
Labour 38%
Conservatives 34%
LDs 12%
https://twitter.com/OpiniumResearch/status/1566138965559652352?s=20&t=bcYiechy4LAcRQXuuFY1vw
But none of these leads all of them by miles
On the other hand, I have discovered Nat King Cole’s version of A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square
And the oysters? The oysters, you ask?
Two dozen Carlingfords. Delicious
So a photocopier was 1 digit from being a large piece of drilling equipment….
All pretty meaningless at this time - the Conservative leadership battle has continued to dominate the headlines even during the political "quiet" period. What will be interesting is how the public view the initial pronouncements from the Truss administration early next week.
Like Villa v Coty tonight - all the Villa fans wanting a Gerard gone but they get a surprise performance and they are roaring the team on.
We saw it with the Shagger even towards the end that when Labour attacked they all rallied round.
Maybe best to let Truss hang herself in the Westminster bubble but focus attacks outside that space. Don’t give the Tories any hook to hang support on.
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/liz-trusss-team-mull-bill-to-wreck-indyref2-campaign-hhnbmqjck