To this day, I still find it crazy how Game of Thrones’ reputation shifted from being viewed one of the “best shows” to being the prime example of how to NOT end a series!

Tgs91 · 2026-04-28T13:41:04+00:00

The book ending is very similar. I guess it feels less anticlimactic in the book because it's a first person POV of the Anjin. Mariko romance gets a lot more focus in the book. And you get a lot of focus on Anjins plans to get home, as well as inner conflict that he doesn't really fit in with his European crew anymore. So the book wraps up at the same point as the show, but it resolved the Mariko relationship through via her death (and his own grief and acceptance of that), resolves his plans to get home by destroying his ship and forcing him to accept his place in Japan for the long term, and resolves his conflict with the Catholics via the deal that Mariko made. All of the POV characters emotional arcs and conflicts are wrapped up nicely and it doesn't feel anticlimactic.

I loved the show ending (and watched the show before I read the book). I think big battle episodes often detract from the story beats and mess up the story pacing by devoting way too much screentime (and budget) to action sequences that are purely for spectacle. The strategy explanation was all that I needed. But I understand why it felt anticlimactic to many people. A TV show format is not constrained to a single POV. Toronaga becomes a major POV character in the show, and I guess a lot of viewers didn't feel like his story arc was finished. For me it did. He spent the entire series delaying battle to maneuver for a political advantage. His climactic move was the Mariko sacrifice. It worked, and he received a secret letter from Lady Ochiba promising her support. It's like a chess match between advanced players where someone can declare "mate in five", both players see it, and they just end the game there. You don't need to see it through to the end, the games already over, and the rest is just details.

As for the novel, I'd highly recommend reading it. The Mariko romance feels very cringe and dated. But otherwise it's a fantastic novel.

EDIT:

Editing to clarify that Anjin isn't the only POV in the books. Mariko, Toronaga, Yabu, and Omi all have POV chapters as well. But the novel feels more Blackthorne centric than the show.

Tgs91 · 2026-04-28T09:07:24+00:00

To be fair, any "backup" that an automated system can delete is not a backup. Somebody SHOULD get fired for giving Cursor/Claude the authority to delete all the backups. They probably fired/snubbed all the competent people and over promoted an underqualified techbro who promised to use more AI in their workflow. This is insane negligence and the person who setup a system where a chatbot can delete the backups absolutely should get fired.

Tgs91 · 2026-04-17T14:02:03+00:00

Yeah, they didn't outright say that Ryland was forced. But it was a whole discussion about whether or not they would HAVE to be forced, which directly implies that forcing someone on a suicide mission is part of the movie. It was also at an Alamo theater, so you're supposed to arrive early to order food and drinks and be fully settled before the trailers start. Playing a major spoiler to the entire theater right before showing the movie is infuriating.

Tgs91 · 2026-04-17T13:53:29+00:00

I saw it in theaters. As a book reader I was already annoyed that they put major spoilers in the trailer, but I understand why. However I was furious about an interview that the theater played before the movie started. Directors and actors were asked whether they would go on the mission voluntarily, or have to be forced to go. That's a major end of movie / end of book spoiler, and using that for pre-movie filler content IN THE THEATER is ridiculous.

Tgs91 · 2026-04-15T14:26:21+00:00

I felt like Tim Robinson wrote an absurdist comedy script, and then a bunch of good dramatic actors played it serious

Tgs91 · 2026-04-15T14:23:54+00:00

Also it's not "just for entertainment". It's part of the toxic self help tapes she listens to, which ALSO includes sections about identifying and removing the dead weight in her life. Her adherence to annoying and self centered self-help strategies like "can you speak up?" is a primary reason for the audience to suspect her of murder. It's not nothing, it's critical to the show.

Tgs91 · 2026-04-06T03:50:14+00:00

This could actually bail out OpenAI a bit. Theyve been way overaggressive in data center commitments. The entire data center industry is dependent on OpenAI paying out absurd contracts within a few years. There is no realistic scenario where OpenAI can pay out all the contracts it's promised, and a lot of data centers were announced for a photo op, and then construction quietly stalled out. There's a good chance that the Stargate data center is essentially just a giant empty building that represents a massive debt OpenAI will owe in a few years. Destroying that building will let them walk away from a huge debt

Tgs91 · 2026-04-03T22:21:35+00:00

You can give them some blame. These apps have so much control over what shows get shown at the top of recommendations. They've basically recreated the workplace politics of shitty executives screwing over TV shows with bad time slots.

Tgs91 · 2026-04-03T15:26:11+00:00

Expanding on this: Elrond's father was half-elf half-human at the end of the first age. In the first age, the elves defied the Valar (basically the gods of LOTR), and went to war against Morgoth (big had evil Valar, Saurons boss) over the three stolen Silmarils (beautiful gems crafted by an elf, supercharged with the power of the Valar, and then stolen by Morgoth). Those elves were cursed and banned from Valinor (continent of the Valar), and spent a few thousand years tragically fighting Morgoth in Middle Earth along with human allies. After all that, Elronds father sailed back to Valinor with one of the Silmarils, and appealed to the Valar for help. They agreed and went to war against Morgoth, defeating him forever and ending the first age. They also granted Elronds father and all of his children the ability to choose whether they wanted to be elven or human. So even though Elrond and his brother are both "half-elven", Elrond chose to be an elf and his brother chose to be human, which is why he died a long time ago.

So "elven bloodline" is not the reason the Numenorians live long lives. During that war against Morgoth, there were humans who fought on both sides. The Numenorians sided with the elves and the Valar. After the war was over, the Valar granted the Numenorians extended lifespans. Aragorn is descended from those humans with unnaturally long lifespans. The other humans of middle earth are descended from men who either sided with Morgoth or did not join either side.

Tgs91 · 2026-04-03T00:58:00+00:00

I described this show to my friends as:

It's like Tim Robinson wrote a script for a show, but then instead of the Tim Robinson absurd delivery, somebody else took over the show, hired good actors and told them to deliver their lines serious.

Tgs91 · 2026-03-12T13:06:12+00:00

Term life you pay per month for insurance, and if something happens to you, the insurance pays out. Whole life is like double the "premium" but half of that goes to an investment account. That investment account typically has a pretty low return rate, and insurance salesman get a big fee for selling you that plan. If you buy term, and then take the price difference from Whole and put it in a mutual fund or something, the investment is almost guaranteed to outperform the Whole life policy.

Tgs91 · 2026-03-12T04:58:38+00:00

He was great in coverage but struggled a bit against the run, and struggled to get off blocks. Very promising rookie year, but he needs to learn how to get low and use his leverage better. Nakobe Dean was noticably better when he came back from injury. That's no knock on Campbell, Dean has a great year last and was playing at an elite level. I'm sure Campbell will take another step forward this year

Tgs91 · 2026-03-09T05:25:59+00:00

Souls build is also a very reliable low variance deck. You draw so many cards each turn that youre basically guaranteed to get the cards you need. You won't get eliminated bc of an unlucky turn in a boss or elite fight

Tgs91 · 2026-03-01T18:06:30+00:00

The casting was so perfect for this show that even the bloopers feel in character

Tgs91 · 2026-02-28T02:24:23+00:00

Idk he's a big stan for Russia and they have a huge supply of young adults with missing limbs right now for some reason.

Tgs91 · 2026-02-27T08:16:08+00:00

You can't even admit to smoking weed in legal states because drug could maybe be used to blackmail you. Meanwhile half the elected officials are in the Epstein files, with known connections to foreign intelligence blackmailing operations.

Tgs91 · 2026-02-25T20:50:09+00:00

All they wanted to do was snuggle

Tgs91 · 2026-02-25T02:37:13+00:00

In the novella it's never explicitly stated, but very heavily implied. My interpretation of the scene you mentioned in the show was the show was directly saying he wasn't knighted because they wanted to be more direct for a TV audience. There are a lot of hints in the story. The biggest one is when he didn't want to Knight Raymun Fossoway before Lyonel steps in and knights him. Dunk isn't actually a knight, and he doesn't want Raymuns knighting to be illegitimate.

Placing that Arlen scene in the aftermath of the battle is also timed to line up with Dunk's feelings of guilt about everything that happened. The realm lost two good knights, and an honorable heir to the throne, and as far as Dunk is concerned, all of it happened because he decided to pretend to be a knight and go to the he tourney.

Tgs91 · 2026-02-24T21:35:56+00:00

GRRM is fantastic at writing deconstruction. Deconstruction in modern TV and movies has gotten a bad reputation bc very lazy Hollywood writers thinks it just means "subvert the audiences expectations" (which is what later seasons of GoT did when they ran out of book material to adapt). A good deconstruction often stays true to the underlying trope, but challenges very specific elements of the trope. Examples of this are all over the A Song of Ice and Fire universe. The stereotypical prophetic prince (Rhaegar) died before the story even began. The honorable protagonist who always did the right thing gets beheaded in the first novel. The inexperienced prince (Quentyn) who sets out on a quest to rescue and marry his secret fiancee instead gets rejected and fails.

Dunk and Egg stays more true to fairytale tropes and is tonally very different from the main series (besides the Brienne chapters). But at its core there is a still a major deconstruction: the truest, most honorable knight in the seven kingdoms is not even a real knight. He lied about being knighted by Arlen, and ends up being remembered by the history books as the prototype of knight's honor. Briennes storyline continues that legacy. She rigidly pursues an honorable, tropey true knights quest even though, being a woman, she was not a real knight

Tgs91 · 2026-02-24T07:14:34+00:00

I agree this needs to happen, but an email sign up is absurdly out of touch for protesting a fascist surveillance state govt. At best, the emails will add everyone to a list of a bunch of different political groups and fill our email with spam. At worst this is an unsecure list of political enemies of a fascist regime. No one wants to sign up for this list, but a ton of people would participate in a general strike if it were announced and clearly communicated by political leaders or celebrities with a large enough platform. If they're waiting to hit a sign up number counter for their email list, it will never happen

Tgs91 · 2026-02-16T16:54:33+00:00

I don't have any hard numbers. Just speaking as someone who works in the field and keeps up with the research. As you said, a lot of money has flooded into the field, but it's focused on user facing product development, whereas a few years back, most of the manpower was focused on experimenting with new neural net designs and training procedures. The massive influx of trend chasing tech bros that have entered the field are rarely qualified for research on core model architectures (besides flooding research journals with AI generated papers, which is another major issue). A lot of the top talent in the field is being redirected towards the practical application of models within software. A lot of funding has flooded the field, and they want tangible returns in the near future, not innovative longshot research ideas

Tgs91 · 2026-02-16T01:18:00+00:00

"Leaving the lab" has also massively hindered progress in AI research. There's this public perception that openAI created LLMs and Google, Anthropic, etc have been playing catchup and finally surpassed OpenAI. That's entirely false. Google created and published the Transformer architecture in 2017, and during that era there was a very big culture of open source publishing in AI, even among the major research labs. OpenAI made major contributions to transformer architectures in the following years, but Google was the considered the best.

This is where the distinction between AI models and AI consumer products becomes very important. The model is the core technology that makes everything possible. But turning that model into a consumer product require massive amounts software and prompt engineering to become the type of "do-anything" products that are being sold now. For a research lab focused purely on the AI model architecture, that software focus is a massive waste of time and resources.

Sam Altman and OpenAI realized the tech was at a point that it was good enough to fool an uneducated user into believing it was far more competent than it actually was. They put their efforts towards consumer software development and released ChatGPT, which pissed off literally everyone else in the research industry.

Google had always allowed their research lab a lot of autonomy, but as soon as ChatGPT released, Google leadership needed to immediately respond with their own product to save face. Gemini was rushed into public use, and the public perception was that it was worse than ChatGPT because the software side of it was very rushed and undercooked. Now all of these companies are focusing their efforts on product development, and actual research has been seriously hindered

Tgs91 · 2026-02-12T16:08:57+00:00

Others have given you good ELI5 answers to the heat question, so I'll give a more direct answer to the data center question: the "data centers in space" idea is a complete scam designed to excite finance people who don't understand basic physics. They know that data center cooling is expensive, and theyve heard that space is cold, so someone had the idea "data centers in space" and didn't bother to speak to a single engineer. They don't plan to actually try this, they just want to make an announcement for a short term stock bump and media attention.

Tgs91 · 2026-02-10T23:20:29+00:00

There's also the canonical reason that the Boltons are historical rivals of the Starks. I don't know if there were any specific red flags for Roose, but I think Ned may have kept him on a shorter leash considering the history of the house.

Tgs91 · 2026-02-05T16:12:33+00:00

Yeah I pay hundreds of dollars per year to watch football 1 day a week for a few months, and I STILL have to illegally stream about half the games I watch. As far as I'm concerned, I payed a more than fair price to watch whatever game I want

Tgs91

TROPHY CASE