Tagged television (Blog)

• Mar 16, 2024, 2:33 PM -04:00

  Breaking The Wheel

  Adaptations are hard work, and The Wheel of Time is harder than most

  It's safe to say that The Wheel of Time TV series, streaming on Amazon Prime, has divided fans of the source material, namely Robert Jordan's enormous, sprawling, epic book series of the same name, spanning 14 door-stopping volumes published over a period of 24 years (1989-2013).

  I would not call myself a great connoisseur of fantasy, but I do know something about these particular books, having been introduced to them as a teenager by a high school friend in the early nineties. I have warm memories of the series, and less warm memories of the tense, multi-year waits in between installments.

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• Apr 5, 2013, 12:50 AM -04:00

  In Defence of the Dark

  I'm addicted to a site called tvtropes.org. It's basically a catalogue of various literary and artistic devices used in various forms of media (books, movies, TV). It's fun because the site gives names to practices that you already recognize but haven't bothered to identify in any specific way. Examples include Genre Blindness, which explains the tendency of Bond villains to reveal their entire master plan to the spy rather than just shooting him, and Lampshading, which is an attempt to diffuse an obvious plot hole by having a character draw attention to it.

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• Feb 27, 2008, 2:52 PM -05:00

  Why Watching "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" Is Not a Waste of Time

  I've been recently spending a significant amount of my free time watching "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" and "Angel" on DVD. I never watched them when they were on the air, but now I'm catching up.

  This has earned me accusations of being hypocritical, since I apparently tend to be critical of people who spend (what I consider to be) too much time watching TV.

  Well...yes and no. I don't think I'm critical of people who spend a lot of time watching TV. How could I be? I watch a lot of TV myself. I am, on the other hand, critical of people who spend a lot of time channel surfing.

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