Showing posts with label TV. Show all posts
Showing posts with label TV. Show all posts

Monday, June 04, 2012

One More Year

hey all,

Just finished watching the season finale of Game of Thrones. I have to say that I'm pretty pleased with how they have adapted the books so far. I still have my grudges and gripes about that one red haired whore character, and I'm a little tweaked that some characters were introduced and then apparently cut for no reason. But their handling of the battle on Blackwater was very well done, even if yes, it was different from the book. And they did manage to justify, at least partially, a major deviation involving the dragons and Qarth. Of course, down the road, this also means another deviation if they get around to filming A Dance with Dragons, as they have killed off one (at least implicitly) of the characters who comes back in that book.

But they can deal with that problem when they get there. For now, they have apparently already started casting for season three, and probably will be moving into shooting sooner or later. But that means I've got a whole ten months or so to wait for the next season.

And who knows when good old GRRM will get around to publishing the next book in the series. My bet is that I will have my student loans paid off before he finishes his next novel. I mean, he has the TV series to help with, his various conventions to go to, his other projects such as Wild Cards and others to keep going.

Cheers,


Wednesday, May 09, 2012

More on Tagging

hey all,

One of the things I noticed when I copied the pics from my camera the other day was that I was really far behind on tagging my photos. Like 8 or 9 months behind. I wanted to use Tagged Frog to do this, but despite having the Meta extension on it, it doesn't seem to find the metadata on sound files and on picture files, except for data that I've personally added there using Tagged Frog in the past. So all those tags I created using Picasa (which are visible to Windows Explorer, BTW), and all the tags on my music files...yep, they're invisible to Tagged Frog.

Why does that matter? Because I've already tagged thousands of photos using Picasa, and I'm not going to do it again in a different program just so I can use Tagged Frog. And since I can't tell which files are tagged and which aren't in Tagged Frog, it is kinda a waste. Still waiting for a solution to this.

On top of that, I had to make sure I had everything ready for my trip to the US Embassy today to renew my passport. I'm not sure it was an exception, but their website said it might take up to 45 minutes to do the paper work, but it only took me about 15 minutes. That is to say, I had already done the paper work at home, and it only took them 15 minutes to process it. This was like a revelation. Recently, it seems like at the Japanese Immigration bureaus I'm always made to wait and wait and wait. I'm hoping when I go in later this month to renew my passport, it will be quicker than before.

I've still been watching Game of Thrones episodes as they are coming out. The second season is just about reaching the climax, and there are only four more episodes left. The next season has already been approved, but they will only cover one half of the next book in the same number of episodes. (Book 3 is really long, ya'll.)

But I've been noticing a lot of random changes. Like they will introduce a character, only to combine things which that character is supposed to say with a main character later on...thus, one would think, eliminating the need to have introduced that character in the first place.

Or, adding material not in the books that just doesn't make sense. I understand the need to cut things from the books. Heck, with the exception of Tom Bombagil in The Lord of the Rings, I think the movies are better than the books in terms of drama, actions, pacing, and story-telling. But if you are going to add nonsense stuff in place of good stuff from the books, why not just stop making the TV series and let me imagine them the way they were written? For example, they keep adding scenes about this red haired whore (I think that was her original cast listing...). She isn't in the books, and really doesn't add anything much to the story, except as a way of getting inside/near some of the characters that didn't receive POV chapters in the books. But this is TV folks. Just show what the freaking non-POV characters are doing when they aren't with the POV characters. Why add a whole new character just do accomplish this?

And in the latest episode, they have added an incident where Dany's dragons are stolen from her by a mysterious someone. I don't know what function the incident is to serve, but it is one of the most drastic departures from the books yet. I'm hoping they can justify it.

Cheers,