“epical”?

Nope. Another click bait rage garbage article, from no less than Forbes, the shittiest cesspool of shitty shit on the internet.

The show is fine. Looks amazing, sounds incredible, full of wonderful performances and nuanced characters with interesting takes on adapting an incredibly complex source material. I’ll take it over 90% of “prestige” dramas about rich families and murder procedurals any day.

Even if it’s not your particular bag, it doesn’t deserve anywhere near the level of vitriol leveled at it by people desperate to drive clicks to their mediocre blog or reaction channel.

TheOneRing.net had an incisive take on this recently that I think everyone ought to read. https://www.theonering.net/torwp/2024/09/06/119303-dont-kill-content-no-one-needs-your-hot-take/

Would explain an awful lot about the state of cinema lately.

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What a twat.

The people who actually make these games have said that the timeline in Hyrule Historia is little no more than elevated fanfiction, because they don’t follow it when making their games. It’s all retcon and forced connections.

People who want them to have some shared continuity as if they’re a real history might as well make a timeline for Mario too. It’s silly, and misses the point

Headline is misleading. There is no canon timeline and never has been, regardless of what officially-licensed book it was published in.

The game designers have said many times that they don’t take any sort of timeline into account when designing a new Zelda game. They nail down the mechanics, and the story comes next, and if it happens to match up thematically in relation to another game, that’s just a bonus.

I feel a bit of pity for all of you who can’t find it in yourselves to enjoy this show even a little bit. The visual quality is exquisite, the performances are marvelous, and the score is rousing and exciting. The dwarves are entertaining as hell, the harfoots and Totally-Not-Gandalf are charming, the orcs are suitably disgusting and terrifying even as this season attempts to make some of them just sympathetic enough to understand Adar’s angle, and even the growing strife amongst the elves is dripping with pulpy drama worthy of any good tragedy.

It’ll never be Tolkien, and I empathize with those who wanted nothing else from it but a straight-faced dramatization of the tale of years. But taken as a high fantasy with rich characters and lavish production values, I can’t find much to complain about. But I’m a simple man.

It’s still a pretty young technology, and it took a few years to understand the impacts of it. We’ve had them long enough now to be able to see how detrimental they have been to the first generation using them.

We find out early on that the original John Connor was never the son of Sarah Connor, but just some random guy who rose to the challenge and became the leader of the human resistance. Knowing that the machines had developed time travel, he adopted the name and history of some random dead guy and leaked this to the machines, knowing they would go back and try to kill them. He sent Kyle back to protect them, with the plan of conceiving John Connor and raising him up as an even better leader.

Cut back to the future war, and now there are two John Connors.

So your plan is to kill the franchise so hard that nobody will ever want to touch it again? I like it.

There’s a quick shot of another adventuring party while they’re in the maze, and those guys are all made up to look like the characters from the show. It’s pretty blink-and-you’ll miss it.

That’s consistent with Sam’s station as a humble gardener, not a member of the loose aristocracy class like Frodo or Merry and Pippin, who had the leisure and wont to go out a-walking just for fun - and also those latter had relatives near the south of the Shore, and so would have reason to visit the area.

I laud your devotion to accuracy, but I also offer some middle ground. Tobacco itself is known to possess psychoactive properties, and Middle-earth, insofar as it can be said to be a precursor to the modern world at all (for Tolkien himself drifted away from this idea later in his life and work), is eons in the past, when many things were heightened. So it’s not so far a leap to imagine that pipeweed could have had as much in common with modern strains of marijuana as it did with what we call tobacco.

After all, our own tobacco originated in the Americas, probably somewhere in the region of modern Bolovia, and was not commonly used in Europe until the 16th Century. If one allows the conceit that Middle-earth represents a primordial version of modern Europe, then it follows that pipeweed itself also originated in the West (for was it not said to have been imported from Númenor, that land blessed by the Valar?). If indeed it was a strain of nicotiana, then it must have been of a varietal so pleasant to smoke that even the Valar themselves partook of it. At some point, it died out in the lands of Men, and was forgotten until its rediscovery by colonial exchanges with the indigenous people of the Americas.

TL;dr: Pipeweed is not weed, nor is it something modern people would recognize as garden variety tobacco. It’s better than either of those things.

They are constructs, imitations of life, animated by the evil will of Morgoth and his foul apprentice Sauron. They’re no more people than ChatGPT is people.

Orcs aren’t people and I’m not afraid to say it.

This is precious.

Yeah, so was McCain until he got onto the ticket and every GOP puppet master shoved their arms up his ass.

Is there any confirmation that they were there before that point?