#I'm starting now when theres only a few episodes because i think following along with a week inbetween every 20 minutes

[i-post-posts]

Listening to the first episode of the magnus protocol is like dipping a hand in to test the temperature of the bath while already being able to see it's boiling

[redstonedust]

wait im confused what is this kerilson lore you mentioned im apprently missing out on? Who/what is kerilson??

ok i'm gonna recap literally everything i can remember about kerilson because i'm not sure how much context you have. SO. INCOMING INFODUMP:

if you've been following the rest of hermitcraft season 9 you'd know that the majority of the active hermits went through the rift and got trapped on empires smp for a month. one of the only hermits left behind was xb, and he handled this... interestingly (badly)

so after showing footage of the hermits going through the rift via a security camera he apparently has set up in grians base, and then trying to claim the entire shopping district as his property (off to a good start) he opens his next episode proudly declaring that he's actually NOT alone, he has a friend, and that friend knows how to open the rift again!

enter kerilson:

i should clarify that kerilson is, first and foremost, a reference to the movie castaway. like. in that movie the protagonist is stuck on an island with nobody to talk to but a volleyball he's named wilson. so theres already precedent for kerilson being just xb going kind of stir crazy without his friends (especially keralis).

so according to xb, kerilson demands a diamond throne (which also includes concrete slabs, the first sign that something weird is going on) and then they reopen the rift. except the rift sends xb to previous hermitcraft seasons instead of empires, where kerilson is distracted by wanting to look at past keralis builds instead of helping xb find his friends. eventually xb DOES end up on empires, but its season 1, and he's completely alone.

he wanders through the server, finds the ocean, spends several days at sea, gets picked up by a flying kerilson themed boat, the scenery warps back into his base, he gets back into bed, and then is woken up by beef, who seems disturbed by the fact xb is even IN bed. bc, y'know, hermitcraft, sleep should be instant.

he concludes the whole thing was a dream, tho that doesnt explain how he's able to accurately dream of empires s1, but gem's empires lore establishes sleep based world hopping so...... put a pin in that.

anyways two episodes later kerilson can be spotted watching xb in the background of his base, but isnt acknoweldged. xb continues to be Totally Normal about his missing friends by building a giant keralis statue, except every time he looks back at it its head is replaced with kerilsons head. so he blows it up.

several months pass with v few kerilson hints, until xb starts teasing a makeship plushie of him and kerilson. in this weirdest way possible. ie. while building his base he mentions he's started hearing noises, and a low joepacity kerilson flashes on screen with scrambled keralis dialog in the background. (side note: xb heard similarly scrambled keralis dialog when keralis was coming back through the rift. unclear if this is related.)

aaand bringing it to now, xb gets a book inviting him to a TCG match, which turns out to be against kerilson. who is apparently real and able to hold TCG matches. except during the animation of the match kerilson never moves and keralis is shown to be helping him behind the scenes, implying kerilson was just an armor stand all along-- except for, you know, the whole established dream demon aspect.

and now he's a marketable plushie! :D

so yeah TLDR: he's an armor stand who has been simultaniously implied to be a figment of xb's imagination, a regular armor stand xb thinks is alive, a regular armor stand controlled by keralis, some kind of fragment of keralis, and an independent, dream controlling being. and also keralis has little to no involvement in any of these episodes.

and as a fun side note, this isnt the first time we've seen some kind of logic defying facsimile of keralis appear in somebody elses episode. when tango went to space to try and stop the moon crashing in season 8, he ran into keralis, who stated he'd been there for months, even tho this is not true in keralis' episodes.

both of these are also scenarios where the enviroment is implied to not be real (a dream / a simulation) and the keralis-a-like appears to help them as they try to leave the server. coincidence? absolutely. but i love to make lore out of nothing!

[gikairan]

Okay I watched all 3 episodes now

Thoughts under the cut, including spoilers for all the books

So a lot of the changes i dont necessarily disagree with, but theres a few things i object to

- Giving Perrin a wife just to fridge her. Bad trope, stop doing it. I'm guessing its to give Perrin more obvious external conflict? His internal conflict about the Wolves is less obvious for a TV show, so maybe the showrunners wanted to give him another kind of conflict? Speaking of which- where is Elyas?

- They went through Shadar Logoth too quickly. That could have been an episode all of its own, tbh. Shadar Logoth is a pretty cool section of the book, and it kinda sucks to see it mostly glossed over And uh... hello? BELA?? You just left her?? Shes supposed to make it to the last battle ): ):

- They didnt have Tam sickly make the admission that Rand is a found child. I guess they dont want to hint that Rand is not actually from the Two Rivers, and therefore born on Dragonmount as per the prophecies. They really want to make it a mystery who is the Dragon Reborn. Thing is, this does kinda kill some of Rands future identity crisis.

- some of the pacing and dialogue feels... rough. Like, the Shadar Logoth conversation with Lan is a prime example of the rough dialogue. Mat asks why theyre there, and Lans answer is "dont touch anything". Lan is very much the silent kind who only speaks when he has something Important to say, but those two sentences didnt go next to each other. The pacing at the beginning of episode 2 definitely was the strangest. By the end of episode 3, i feel like its starting to get better? Some of the pacing definitely feels like victims of "we need to cover a bunch of farm kids travelling and not doing much in an interesting way". IDK man, i'm not the best with film/ tv criticism. But something just feels a bit rough.

- Again, the CGI isnt great. Its too obvious and a bit jarring.

- Theyre saying Our Swears and i dont like it ):. In the books, there actually isnt a lot of swearing.

And my biggest issue- i'm not actually sure HOW easy this is to follow along WiTHOUT reading the books first. I know whats happening because I've recently gone through The Eye of the World. I'm not sure how someone without that background knowledge is going to find this. Amazon do actually have background information tied to individual scenes, but you need to pause to even read it.

BUT despite all this

I dont think its necessarily a bad adaptation so far. Its hitting the right story notes, introducing some of the worldbuilding thats important (Like an early introduction to the Whitecloaks) in a visual way.

I dont necessarily think all the changes are bad. I do believe a lot of the differences make sense. its mostly the stuff above that im questioning

I actually really liked Dana. I find the books dont really give any reasoning why people become Darkfriends. There was one darkfriend who explains his reasoning in book 2, but mostly the series kinda makes it seem like theyre just ~evil~. Having explanations and understanding why people become Darkfriends, making it seem more like a GREY moral choice? Excellent addition.

The CGI might also be rough, but i like what theyre doing with the Trollocs. The designs look good. I like how different they all look- youve got some that are running digitrade, some that are running plantigrade and upright, some that are straight up running on all 4 legs. It works! ... The CGI just doesnt feel like it belongs

Its so diverse, guys. Its just... so nice to see all kinds of people in the main cast or in the background. It even says in the series that skin tone isnt an accurate indicator of where someone is from, more like how they dress and speak. And the extras match that! Its not just like they got a handful of token POC to scatter around. No, every scene has all kinds of people in it! Its Fantastic!

[missjackil]

My Diary to the SPN Finale

Day 4. 

I overslept my alarm and was almost late for work. Normally. I have a terrible time staying asleep. Most of you who message me know Im up at 4am sometimes. My life is very stressful so its very hard to sleep, so when I wake up at 4am I always put the boys on, watch one or 2 episodes and go back to sleep/ Last night and the night before however, I slept straight through and past my alarm. “This is great!” one may think, but I spent all day exhausted anyway. What I think is happening, is that even though my body is too tense to rest, it knows to spend an hour or 2 with the boy's won't help. 

I went to work, forgot what I was doing a bunch of times, and forgot how to do some things I've done a bunch of times. I have to make up excuses, I can't say “My fav show is ending and I'm devastated” or people will think I'm nuts. 

At work, all I want to do is come home. But at home, my kids are breaking my heart, my pets are making me insane, and my house is falling apart, and my “security blanket” now feels like jagged sandpaper on my heart.

I'm not a drug user, nor much of a drinker (socially at best) but how stupid is it, that now I want to do both?  Im actually jealous now of those who can drink or pop enough pills to be numb. My vice is smoking. Yesterday I lit a smoke when I left work and a customer said “That shit will kill you” and I answered “I sure hope so”  Im going to give you all a little background history of me, Its ok if you stop reading now, but follow along if you dare😳

Im 52 and have had clinical depression my entire life. At the very least since I was 4. I dont know how it started but its been there as long as I can remember. needless to say my childhood sucked. Anything that could go wrong did. Im terminally single, unattractive, and perpetually poor even though Ive gone to college twice and have 3 degrees. Ive had 4 failed suicide attempts, my first was when I was 12 and ate 30 +\- asprin which only gave me bleeding ulcers and liver damage and 2 years of therapy that was worthless.

In Jan 2014, my life changed. I came into a good sized inheritance from an uncle who was a retired Army Sgt (mujch more about that I dont know other than he fought in Korea) and was left $50,000. (as were each of my sisters) I didnt go nuts and spend this right away, my daughter, father, and I were living in a decent apartment and  was saving it for a down payment on a house. My sisters all used their money to pay off their mortgages and other bills. I was looking for a nice house to buy, but even with $50K I wasnt sure I could handle the property taxes and utilities that had been previously covered by my landlord. My father decided that stairs were no longer something he could handle, so he moved in with my younger sister, so decided that I would just pay a lot of up front rent on our apt and stay there a few more years, but no, the landlord informed us they were selling in 3 months and there was no guarentee the buyer would want to rent out our unit. 

Then my car died, which was what was getting my daughter and I back and forth to work. Now I have to dip into the money and get a car. I got a $7000 used car that we shared and as soon as the warrenty was up, everything failed. After spending $2000 for repairs and it was still falling apart, I get another one... cheaper this time, but hey, it runs. 

Time goes by, we have 30 days to move out, as predicted, the buyer didnt want to rent our unit out, he wanted to move his mother in. So now Im scrambling to find something to move into in 30 days I find a trailer that seemed like it would be a good fit for just me and my dauhter, lots of room, 2 bathroom a nice yard. Im just about to buy said trailer and the park informs me its been sold because a buyer offered cash. Im like “Ummm I have cash too!” and theyre like “oh.... we were unaware.... but hey we have another one for you” and this one is much smaller, but a newer model so it wont need as much work. With 2 weeks left to move, I reluctantly take it. Now, we move, but with no one and I mean absolutely NO ONE to help us, we left 90% of our belongings in our old apartment because we cant lift shit and neither of us could rent a truck, we only brought what we could carry out. and I had to spend the rest of the money on furnature. Of course I lost my security deposit and also had to pay an additional $2000 for “clean up” of my old apt. 

Fast forward to March 1 2015, Im back to broke but still working my ass off. My dryer is broke, my AC and heater, the back door has been leaking quietly for so long you cant step within 2 feet from it or youll go through the floor. Theres a crack in my bathtub that has leaked under the house and is causing my back yard to slowly sink. My daughter works and together we can afford the lot ren, utilities and food. Nothing extra though. We were saving to start fixing things but trying to decided what was most important, and what was most costly. The dryer is cheapest, the leaky tub and sinkling yard is the most expensive but HAS to be done at some poijnt. I buy space heaters and wall unit ACs but that gives me $300 electric bills LOLOL. However I am introduced to SPN and these wonderful boys that I love instantly, and gives me an escape. Helps keep me sane. 

We get things almost together, then suddenly, my father died from the flu Feb 1st 2018. This day was the worst day of my life, it was also the night Various and Sundary Villians aired and after all the tears with my sisters and trying to get arrange,ents made, ALL I could think of was coming home and just escaping into my boys for a while. And I did, and it was a blessing. However, within a couple months, my younger sister and I are hit with my dads bills. Hospital bills, credit cards, car payments on a H3 Hummer he bought a few months before. My older sisters didnt get hit with this because they’re his step children, just my younger sister and I do. $30,000 of debt split between my younger sister and I. I havent been able to pay on any of it because they dont give me any option for low payments. Its like “$1500 by whatevermonth 30th or we take you to court” My sister is handling it ok because her husband makes $$$ but not enough to help me too. So, right now Im just keeping my house heated and my kid and I fed and my lot rent paid. Soon my wages will be garnished and I wont have that either and it will be all on my daughter. Now, my escape, the last thing in my whole world I enjoy is ending. So yes.... Im hurting.