Tales & Trails of a Traveling Wiseguy

This morning as I arose from bed I felt a moment of nostalgia. "It's Christmas morning," I remembered. "What presents have magically appeared under the tree?"

Of course it's been decades since I believed in Santa Claus or presents magically appearing beneath a Christmas tree. It's also been almost as many decades since I actually believed in Christmas. ....Oh, I don't deny that Christmas exists. It's a religious holiday that's important to one of the world's large religions. I'm just not a religious person.

Bah, Humbug?

I've written about Christmas with the tag Bah Humbug on LiveJournal for years. Partly that's a personal inside joke, dating back years now to when I was in graduate school. The preeminent technical conference in my field had its annual submissions deadline in early January. Late December was crunch time to finish up our research and writing. That year I was working on not one, nor two, but three papers for the conference. It was mega crunch time. I recall I went to the lab sometime around 1pm on December 24th and left to go home at 7am, having pulled an all-nighter (one of many). "I'm part of the Bah-Humbug Brigade!" I chuckled to myself as I settled down to sleep around 8 on Christmas morning.

Over the years since then I've kept Bah, Humbug as a meme to encapsulate my feeling of alienation at this time of year. Christmas is familiar to me because I grew up in a religious family celebrating it, and simultaneously foreign because I'm not longer religious and haven't celebrated it for years. At Christmastime I feel like I'm on the outside looking in through the glass with a tinge of longing— as well as a tinge of disgust at what it's become.

Of course I didn't invent the phrase Bah, Humbug. It entered our cultural lexicon with Charles Dickens's classic 1843 novel, A Christmas Carol. "Bah, humbug!" was the memorable refrain of the main character, Ebenezer Scrooge, a greedy man who scoffed at the religious significance of Christmas to anyone. He thought it was theft that his employees wanted even one day off to celebrate at home with their families.

I chuckle at saying "Bah, humbug!" but I'm not Scrooge. I don't deny the importance of Christmas to the 2-billion-plus Christians in the world... or the people who've embraced the American cultural version of Christmas as a month-long celebration of consumerism (oops, there's my tinge of disgust coming trough). I'm just not one of them. But if you are, I'm happy for you.

Most Years I Travel. This Year We're Home-bound.

Another way I'm not like Scrooge is that I don't intend to work on Christmas. ...Not since that one time years ago in grad school, anyway! 🙃

Most years I take advantage of the time off my employer provides, and the generally slow place of business at this time of year, to travel. For example, last year Hawk and I were hiking in Panama on Christmas. The year before we were touring Sydney, Australia on foot. In 2022 we visited the California desert and spent Christmas day climbing huge sand dunes, visiting an abandoned train station, driving a 4x4 trail, and exploring lava tube caves. In 2021 we were on the beach in Waikiki, Hawaii at Christmas.

In fact the last time we didn't go anywhere over Christmas was 5 years ago. That was back in the depths of the Coronavirus pandemic, before the vaccines were available to more than a handful of lucky recipients.

Indeed, what December 2020 and now have in common is that Being Sick Sucks. Oh, fortunately it's not another raging pandemic that's keeping us home this year. It's just the uncertainty around Hawk's recovery from foot surgery a few months ago. And it's just as well we didn't try to plan anything around that as she suffered a major setback a few days ago that left her unable even to walk inside the house for a few days.

Yesterday Hawk sold most of her comicbook collection. For years it has been occuping a few dozen long boxes in our "Hobbit Hole" behind the garage. We don't have an exact before picture of the collection, but here's a photo from when were were doing some cleaning in the Hobbit Hole a few years ago:



The longboxes were piled 3 high (and I think 9 across) on the left side in the picture.

Hawk sold just over 6,000 issues. They filled 23 longboxes.



A dealer came to buy them on Monday.

And here's the money shot:



Hawk now has a stack of Benjamins instead of a wall of boxes in the Hobbit Hole. ...Well, she still has a small wall of boxes. She kept about 1,200 issues of her collection. They fill 9 shortboxes.

New Zealand Travelog #25
WLG Airport - Mon, 15 Apr 2024, 1pm

This morning we flew out from Queenstown. And wouldn't you know it, the skies were finally clear. The whole fucking week has been clouds and rain, and now I see this from the top of the stairs boarding the jet:



Oh, and I finally saw 12,000' Mt. Cook today, too. Another thing that after two days of being clouded in, is finally visible today.



Unfortunately I only get to see it from the window of the aircraft as we fly over at 36,000', and even then only by leaning over my rowmate in the window seat (after asking politely!) to snap a picture.

Then, at Wellington Airport, I found that instead of flying an Airbus A320, I could have flown a giant eagle.



Yeah, there are a bunch of places in New Zealand cashing in on Lord of the Rings lore. The location sets were famously filmed in this country. I'm pretty sure they didn't use a 21st century airport as a location, though. But I guess if you're going to have people flying giant eagles around, the airport makes as much sense as a birds-of-prey center, and these birds might freak out the actual birds of prey.



Seeing Gandalf atop this giant eagle in the airport all I can think of now is his "You would not part an old man with his walking stick" line in the hall of Theoden with Wormwood's goons replaced by TSA agents.

Here are a few more thoughts about S2E1 of the Wheel of Time series streaming on Amazon Prime. The episode is entitled "A Taste of Solitude", not "The Darkfriend Social" like you might have thought from my previous blog. That's just a fun sobriquet that a friend of mine created over 30 years ago that's since become common in the fandom! Following that the bulk of the episode aligns to its name, showing how the main characters are split up and dealing with things on their own. Here are Five Things:

1. Moiraine Labors Without the One Power

In the next scene we see Moiraine at Tifan's Well, a remote villa owned by fellow Aes Sedai Verin Mathwin. She's laboring to carry water drawn from a well up the hill to the manor. She's doing this as part of her... exercises, for lack of a better term... to keep herself focused while cut off from the One Power.

Yes, Moiraine's still cut off— Ishamael did that to her in S1E8— even though it's apparently been several months now. I think the writers intend this as Moiraine being Stilled, as it was called in the books, rather than merely temporarily shielded. In the books both things can happen, though being Stilled is far more powerful and punishing. It seems the show writers do not differentiate the two.

Of course, in terms of divergence from the books, the show writers also made up Moiraine being exiled from the White Tower earlier in S1 and being out here with Verin in S2. In the books Verin was in the Tower at this point. The show writers are definitely writing their own story at this point.

As I explained in my previous blog, that's not bad per se. It is a bit disorienting to us viewers familiar with the books. But ultimately this show will have to stand on its own as good TV. I think they're making good TV here by pushing Moiraine into the background, showing what a plotter she still is, and leaving the younger folks from the Two Rivers to have to fend more for themselves. That part at least is true to the spirit of the books.

2. Novices in the Tower

The third major scene shows Egwene and Nynaeve studying as Novices in the Tower. We see the degradation of the scut work they're given (novices scrub plates and pots in the kitchen) and the harsh way the Aes Sedai frame their lessons in channeling the One Power. Each of the girls is given a glass of dirty water and told they must drink it— after passing it through a magic weave they're being taught to purify it. The harshness is "Learn this thing fast or you swallow mud," which the teacher is very direct about.

This is an enjoyably vivid way of showing these two aspects of Egwene's and Nynaeve's life in the tower compared to the page, and pages, and pages of, frankly, dull prose in the books describing it. That's often the case with visual media, though. Showrunners can show a scene that conveys in 2 minutes what 100 pages struggle to say. Oh, and Nynaeve's stubbornness and difficulty channeling are beautifully shown in a quick scene where ( Tiny spoiler )

There's still the books-vs-TV issue that Nynaeve is a novice. In the books she was admitted as Accepted right away because of her strength in the power. I'm not sure this really matters. Frankly I like it better with the two women from the Two Rivers continuing to bond as there was time for little of that character development in season 1.

3. Loial's Not Dead!

The next arc of the episode follows Perrin as the viewpoint character. He's traveling with a band of Shienaran soldiers pursuing the dastardly darkfriend Padan Fain. Fain snuck into Fal Dara (in Shienar), killed a bunch of people, and stole the Horn of Valere. (That was S1E8 in the TV series but early 2nd book.) The horn is a magical artifact that summons heroes of legend and is storied to be important in winning the looming battle against the Dark One.

The TV writers change up the plotlines here. Mat and Rand are not with Perrin here. Nor is Verin; she's off at her private ranch with Moiraine, as noted above. In the books they're on this mission together. But one person I was surprised to see here is Loial— he's not dead!

The showrunners left it vague at the end of S1 whether Loial had died when had Padan Fain stabbed him (and Uno, and others) with a cursed dagger in Fal Dara. I assumed they meant to kill off Loial because they'd obviously spent so little money on FX for portraying him as an 8 to 9 foot tall quasi-human with tufted ears and hands. I mean, it only makes sense to cheap out so badly with a low-budget Loial in S1E5 if they've rewritten him as a throw-away minor character going who only has a few brief appearances.

4. Is that Idris Elba?

Another juggle in "Who's where, and when?" between books and TV involves the Shienarans' new tracker. In the books it's a long-term minor character, Hurin. In the TV series there's mumbling between soldier extras about "some new tracker". In a big reveal we see it's Elyas Machera— an interesting minor character from book 1 who was sadly cut out of season 1 to condense the story. While he's minor in the story as a whole he's actually really important to helping develop Perrin's character, so I'm glad they worked him in here.

For those not familiar with the books— and, okay, for us fans of the books, too— part of what makes this is a big reveal is probably, "Wait, is that Idris Elba?!" Haha, no, it's actor Gary Beadle. The showrunners aren't willing to spend the kind of money it would take to cast a big-screen star like Elba, especially for a minor character. Though Beadle's makeup and costuming with glowing, golden eyes sure recall Elba's portrayal of Heimdall in various Marvel movies.

5. Ingtar Admonishes Perrin: "They had a reason"

As Perrin and the Shienarans survey a slaughter scene left behind by Padan Fain and his band of darkfriends and evil monsters, Perrin frets about how he may not be able to contain his rage when they catch the darkfriends.

The group's leader, Ingtar, cautions Perrin about the perils of revenge as a mindset. He explains that if Shienarans sought revenge for all wrongs, there'd be no Shienarans left. He notes that people who do seemingly bad things must've had some reason to do what they did, and admonishes Perrin to pause to consider what that reason might be before assuming the worst and killing them for retribution.

The first half of Ingtar's lesson is standard fare for speeches about revenge, but the second half seems a bit off. Knowing what's revealed later in the books makes it way off. ( Spoiler from later in the second book )

Recently Hawk and I started watching Season 2 of The Wheel of Time. It's streaming on Amazon Prime. As I write this we've watched the first two episodes already. I'm not going to write about them, though, but the series in general up to the start of S2.

Season 2 is not new, per se. Its 8 episodes of dropped 4-5 months ago (September and October 2023). If I'm a a bit late to the party it's because I haven't been sure I care about this party.

Waning interest in The Wheel of Time is, ironically, not a new thing. It's also fittingly not a new thing, as "There are neither beginnings nor endings to the Wheel of Time," as all WoT fans know, and the Pattern repeats itself. "What was once will soon come again." I lost interest in the books halfway through the series years ago, even after the first third of the series had been a defining part of my life for years. It's how I met my wife, among other things. But as "The Wheel of Time turns [...] legend fades to myth, and even myth is forgotten by the time the age that gave birth to it comes again."

A Long Gap

Part of the reason my interest waned in watching Season 2 is the long gap between seasons. The Season 1 finale dropped December 24, 2021. The Season 2 premier dropped over 20 months later, on September 1, 2023. "When's the next one going to come out?" is something we fans of the books agonized over years ago, particularly as the author's pace of writing and publication slowed down. That was one of the reasons I ultimately lost interest in the books halfway through.

With the streaming series there's an external reason, i.e., one that's not just about the writers: Covid shut them down. The global Coronavirus pandemic hit toward the end of production of the first season. It mucked with timetables for preproduction and production of Season 2.

Slower, Faster

Gaps between books was only part of the reason I lost interest in the written series, and it was probably only the secondary reason. The main reason was the sluggish pacing of the story. Being brief was certainly something author Robert Jordan was never accused of. Indeed, among F&SF fans who didn't like his books back in the day, "They're too slow" was basically the entire criticism. Across the first few books I found in the wordiness a lot of richness in developing the characters and the world. By the 5th book, though, it just became ponderous. By the 6th it was painful. After the 7th I found so little happening in the books that, combined with the slowing pacing of publication, I completely lost interest in the series.

Slowness is absolutely not a problem in the streaming version of Wheel of Time. As befits the dictates of the medium, the showrunners are practically racing through the story. Eight episodes of S1 roughly mirrored the first book in the series, The Eye of the World. S2 looks like it will track more or less to book 2, The Great Hunt, in its 8 episodes. Each of these are 600+ page novels so, yeah, a lot has to be condensed. And honestly that's a good thing.

Off Script from the Books. A Refreshed Perspective.

"It's too slow" isn't why I lost interest in the streaming adaptation between seasons. The fact of how widely it breaks from the books in ways big and small is. Now, the gap in my interest isn't at the level of a death sentence, like it was for me with the books years ago, or like it seems to be for some fans of the books in rage-quitting the streaming series after S1. I knew I'd watch it eventually. I just didn't care when. Finally the time came on a weekend when the weather sucks and I was bored nearly to tears.

"Books are books and TV is TV." Believe me, I understand that. Major changes have to be made in adapting a huge and sprawling (many would say too sprawling) series of novels. But as I enumerated across my many blogs from watching S1, the writers of the streaming version have diverged from the books in too many key areas. It's not just cutting out side plots and minor characters— which are generally good changes to make— but changing major plots, major characters, major motivations, and even changing the rules of how the universe works (which books author Robert Jordan was very meticulous about).

My pique about the breadth of these changes softened up a bit by watching Game of Thrones in the long gap between seasons. There, my situation with books-vs-TV familiarity was reversed. I haven't read GoT. I found the streaming series fairly enjoyable for what it was without being tripped up by what differed from the books. I did read about some of those differences in fan wikis about the show... and while some fans were evidently really stuck on the changes made, I found them to be positive changes for the most part.

I applied that perspective in hindsight to S1 of WoT. Were the changes all that bad? Most of them were not— but then again, I was tolerant of those changes from the start. A few things still rub me the wrong way, though. Mat ran off for no reason (truth: there was a problem with the actor and he had to be recast). Rand asked Moiraine to pretend he's dead and ran off. Perrin had a wife and killed her. Oh, and the whole arc of series 1/book 1 changed from "Rand learns he's a child of prophecy and struggles to start to come to grips with his destiny" to "The DrAgOn ReBoRn CoULd bE AnYbOdY!1!" with the writers actively concealing some things about Rand to spring it on viewers as a reveal in the season finale.

Lately you might have noticed me posting with the tag Bah Humbug. It's a tag I've been using for many years on my posts about the Christmas season.

A quick bit of backstory: when I was in graduate school the preeminent technical conference in my field had its annual submissions deadline in early January. Late December was crunch time to finish up our research and writing. One year I was working on not one, nor two, but three papers for the conference. It was mega crunch time. I recall I went to the lab sometime around 1pm on December 24th, worked straight through the night, and left to go home at 7am. It was one of many all-nighters I pulled back then. (And not the only one with a memorable vignette to it. See also: my girlfriend sleeping on the floor of my office and smashing a window to get into my own apartment.) As I settled down to sleep at 8 on Christmas morning I chuckled, "I'm part of the Bah-Humbug Brigade!"

Of course, "Bah, humbug!" connotes more than just, "Oops, I skipped Christmas revelry that one time because I was in a deadline crunch trying to launch my career." As the memorable refrain of Ebenezer Scrooge in Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol it conveys a certain disdain for such revelry. Am I disdainful of such revelry? Well, okay, yes... but not like Scrooge. 😅

Unlike Scrooge I get the idea of the holiday. It's one of the most important celebrations in Christianity, a religion practiced by an estimated 2.5 billion people around the world. If I were a boss I wouldn't begrudge my workers wanting to take the day off. Heck, take a few days off and spend them with family at this joyous time of year, I'd say. And BTW I'd pay those workers enough to afford a turkey dinner every week of the year, too; not just as some self-important act of largesse.

The fourth episode of HBO's five-part miniseries Chernobyl introduces us to liquidators. That's the name used for the half-million-plus soldiers and conscripts who were sent to the Chernobyl exclusion zone to clean up the area after the nuclear fire at the exploded reactor was mostly put out. (The material in and around the open reactor was still highly radioactive, though.) I'm told the word has a less-sinister connotation in Russian, where it means something more like "clean up crew", versus the modern English euphemism for contract killers.

One narrative thread about the liquidators' work is told from the viewpoint Pavel, a young conscript (center in the picture below). Pavel's story comes from a real-life account in Svetlana Alexievich's book, Voices from Chernobyl.



Pavel arrives at a squalid camp near the exclusion zone with no idea what he'll be doing other than being a Chernobyl liquidator— whatever that means. When he finds his assigned group tent he meets Bacho (left, above), a tough soldier who served in the Soviet army in Afghanistan.

Bacho takes Pavel under his wing and quickly explains their crew's assignment. They comb through empty villages in the exclusion zone to kill all the abandoned pets. The animals are abandoned because when people were evacuated they were told to leave all pets behind. Now the animals are poisoned with radiation and must be killed for humanitarian reasons— and to prevent irradiated animals from spreading beyond the zone.

Bacho explains the tactics to Pavel with ruthless efficiency. Pets see humans as providers of food, so the liquidators don't need to go door-to-door looking for them in every single apartment. All they have to do it walk down the streets making noise, and the pets will come to them. Shoot them when they get close. Once animals hear gunshots, though, they may run in fright back to their homes. Then the liquidators follow them inside.



Pavel struggles with the morality of doing this. He's an 18 year old kid from the city, freshly conscripted. Bacho is a grizzled veteran of the brutal Soviet-Afghan war so he's not troubled by it. He does have a strong moral code, though: Don't let the animals suffer. Shoot to kill, when they're close. If one's not killed right away, shoot it again. He doesn't want anyone to let an animal to suffer. He threatens to shoot anyone who does.

Even so, Pavel struggles with the assignment. And as if shooting the animals weren't bad enough, these liquidators must also gather the bodies for burial. They have to chase the animals if they run, throw the corpses into the back of their truck, take them to a mass burial site, and dump them in. The pile of dead pets is then covered over with concrete.



Pavel discusses how to find peace with this assignment when the crew sits down for a field lunch at an abandoned civic center. The banner still hanging from the building proclaims, "Our Goal is the Happiness of All Mankind." This scene is created directly from accounts in Alexievich's book and helps frame the absurdity of the whole situation.

Next blog about Chernobyl: Liquidators, Robots, and Bio-Robots

Something that's bugged me across the arc of Game of Thrones season 7 on TV is the series's reliance on unearned plot points. The writers have written a number of results into the season's plot that are unsupported by... well... the previous 60+ episodes.

This happens a number of times in season 7. Armies loyal to the queen score major victories... how, exactly? We're told they're depleted of soldiers and money from years of war. Meanwhile their enemy is numerically superior and wealthy. And in one case is holding a defensive position worth a significant force multiplier. Yet the queen's side wins.

The ridiculous victories happen off camera, of course. Some might point out that many great battles in the previous 6 seasons were fought off camera, too. How is this different? It's different because those previous fights were plotted out carefully. George RR Martin wrote painfully long books full of way too much detail about battles. (It's a failing of certain fantasy authors, I've noticed, to be battle obsessed.) Now that the showrunners are firmly beyond everything written in the books published so far, they're totally on their own and they're winging it.... Badly.

It's not just battle results that are unearned. The heroic rescue at the end of S7E6 was unearned. Writers flouted rules of time and space to accommodate lazy writing, then the director sneered at fans for calling shenanigans. The surprise with Petyr Baelish in S7E7 was mostly unearned, too. The writers included major characters suddenly having key bits of knowledge and, more importantly, tight coordination on how to act, without showing how either was accomplished. We can guess where the knowledge came from, but the coordination is hard to believe.

Do other shows take cheap shortcuts in writing to support desired plot outcomes? Of course they do. And I call them out when they happen in those shows, too. But the TV writing for Game of Thrones has been fairly tight in that regard, at least up through season 6. That makes the suddenly amateurish writing more appalling.

Hodor is a popular minor character in the Game of Thrones series. He's mentally disabled and can only say his name, "Hodor"— which he does enthusiastically at times, to viewers' amusement. He's a strong and loyal servant at Winterfell whom the Stark family value.



In the TV series it's implied in earlier seasons that Hodor wasn't always mentally disabled. The books so far never address it. Perhaps he was kicked in the head by a horse as a youth and suffered a brain injury? Certainly there were people at Winterfell who knew him when he was a boy... including his grandmother, Old Nan... who'd know when he was injured, if not also how/why.

In S6E2 we get a small spoiler about Hodor's past. In S6E5 we see the full story. It's a major reveal. And... Holy shit, it hits hard.

Spoilers ahead. Note this is also a spoiler for not-yet-published book 6. These scenes have not occurred in the 5 published books. In a behind-the-episode featurette the showrunners explain that author George R.R. Martin revealed these events to them as plot twists that will be in book 6 or later.

( Spoilers from S6E5... and Book 6! 😨 )

In the season 4 finale of Game of Thrones Tyrion Lannister makes difficult, emotionally fraught decisions about what to do to people who've wronged him. The episode was a very satisfying season ender. Only one little thing bothered me: how did Tyrion get from location A to B to C so quickly during the suspenseful part of the show? I looked up the episode notes in an online GoT FAQ to see what detail(s) I might have missed. There in the notes I found more than I expected. Way more. In a section on differences between the books and the TV series I found there was a major omission about his motivation and state of mind for what he did.

Look, I understand TV shows have to cut out things that are in the books. Hundreds of pages of exposition about travels or battles? Has to be cut down to the few most meaningful scenes. A huge cast of minor characters? Condensed to a more manageable number. Subplots that don't advance the main narrative or crucially develop the main characters? Gone.

I wrote about these kinds of variances in my episode by episode blogs on Season 1 of the Wheel of Time streaming adaptation. There I'd read the books and could spot lots of differences. Most of the changes I felt were fine. They were disorienting at first, but soon enough they made sense per the needs outlined above. There were a few changes, though, that were so big, so fundamental to the setting or the narrative or main character development, that I called foul. And this change from the books in the Game of Thrones season 4 finale is one I think might too big.

S4E10 spoilers after the cut.

( S4E10 spoilers (open to view) )