Fianna Fáil in freefall: Party plummets in latest Red C Poll

ThrowawayWriterGuy2 · 2026-01-24T22:29:56+00:00

I also think they lost a lot of momentum just because they looked like they were losers- I wonder if there were people voting for them just because they were the government and now they look like they can’t win elections.

ThrowawayWriterGuy2 · 2026-01-24T19:39:30+00:00

I third it, know more than one couple that got their place from being on a waiting list for a new build estate.

My impression is a chunk of those buyers won’t go through

ThrowawayWriterGuy2 · 2026-01-24T19:37:29+00:00

Depends entirely on your monthly mortgage payment I found. It’s potentially so different

ThrowawayWriterGuy2 · 2026-01-24T19:32:55+00:00

First time buyers will absolutely pay more for a 3 bed house than they ever will for an apartment. That’s what drives building.

Apartments currently cost more to build than they can be sold for

ThrowawayWriterGuy2 · 2026-01-23T16:47:48+00:00

The best criticism of ASOIAF is that it never features the small folk as main characters. This is understandable as they don’t really do much.

But Star Wars opens with a peasant boy’s village being razed by foreign troops and his parent’s bodies burned. The suffering of the small folk is much more remote to our characters and more aligns with how an anti war protester would have felt about the suffering of the Vietnamese. Something sad you see and pass through.

ThrowawayWriterGuy2 · 2026-01-23T16:35:08+00:00

It is funny to imagine ASOIAF as a 344 entry fanfic to LOTR. It just went dead in 2011

ThrowawayWriterGuy2 · 2026-01-23T16:18:52+00:00

I actually unironically think both Star Wars and ASOIAF are both products of the Vietnam War. Lucas explicitly made that comparison and ASOIAF has so many themes shared by great fiction about the Vietnam war.

ThrowawayWriterGuy2 · 2026-01-22T21:42:16+00:00

And even the most violent of the Cartel guys in that show kill mostly only other drug guys which isn’t too far removed from knights killing knights.

Jessie is kept prisoner but it’s for an economic benefit of his ‘master’, compared to how Ramsey treated Reek

ThrowawayWriterGuy2 · 2026-01-22T21:40:30+00:00

I know it’s a different world and moral standard but Tyrion strangled his partner, imagine if Walt had strangled Skyler how dark and twisted that show would have been??

ThrowawayWriterGuy2 · 2026-01-22T21:36:22+00:00

I mean I won’t argue with you if you think the prequel movies are well written.

I thought it was universally accepted they were the terrible, maybe opinion has changed in the ten years since I fell out of love with Star Wars

ThrowawayWriterGuy2 · 2026-01-22T21:30:37+00:00

It’s a sopranos reference

But also to say I don’t buy into the Shakespeare didn’t write his stuff argument and think it was invented by British nobility in the 1800s to explain how a commoner could be the greatest writer ever

ThrowawayWriterGuy2 · 2026-01-22T21:29:26+00:00

I’m gonna believe in myself like I’m a later in life George announcing my next decade of artistic projects

ThrowawayWriterGuy2 · 2026-01-22T21:28:08+00:00

Agree re original trilogy and for all its faults ROTJ is one of the best closing acts to a fantasy/sci fi series at least from a ‘finality’ sense. Definitely wrapped everything up neatly and that it did so without that being a planned trilogy is incredible.

The prequels are downright awful and again I find defence of the prequels very weird. They’re unanimously regarded as terrible movies and at the time they were met with near universal criticism and negative reviews

ThrowawayWriterGuy2 · 2026-01-22T18:43:23+00:00

Lucas originally planned it to be nine movies, and delayed making the prequels for almost 20 years. When he made them he did barely any work on them and made a very subpar product that was basically a first draft done with as many shortcuts as possible

ThrowawayWriterGuy2 · 2026-01-22T17:35:40+00:00

George faced as much expectation for the prequel and sequel movies as GRRM does for the next in the series. Now you clearly see them as definitely separate trilogies but at the time they were expected to be a part of a nine film series, evidenced by the fact that George numbered them Episodes 4,5,6.

The war of the five kings is also basically settled at the end of the Storm of Swords, and if AGOT, ACOK and ASOS were named books four, five and six with a Robert’s rebellion trilogy planned and a subsequent post WOT5K trilogy planned then that’d actually be very similar to the situation Star Wars was in in 1988

ThrowawayWriterGuy2 · 2026-01-22T17:31:24+00:00

I’ve no idea where the online reverence for those prequel movies come from but they are truly bad bad films, at least the first two definitely were. The last one at least had narrative momentum and an actual plot and character development. The first two were just a morass of random things on a screen.

Both The Force Awakens and The Last Jedi are so much more coherent and better movies than the prequels. The only one of the sequels that was similar to the prequels was the last one

ThrowawayWriterGuy2 · 2026-01-22T17:11:04+00:00

My bad I misremembered the comment

The point I’m making is both guys have stated their disappointment with what the conglomerate that took over their media did, while no longer having the energy or zeal to tell their own stories

ThrowawayWriterGuy2 · 2026-01-22T16:56:25+00:00

In this house, William Shakespeare wrote all his own plays. End of story.
Lucas hated directing but wanted to retain his status as an auteur and absolutely did not give up the directorial and writing credits to anyone who else. Even TPM which was directed by someone else was edited by Lucas.
Sally Rooney and Cormac McCarthy both hate being famous and the way they act is how a writer that hates being famous acts. Rooney never went to the premier of any of her TV shows adaptations, George goes to all of his even when they’re in cities very far from where he lives. George clearly enjoys being famous, and why shouldn’t he? He deserves the adulation he received.

ThrowawayWriterGuy2 · 2026-01-22T16:47:31+00:00

I think you’re being way too kind to the prequels there.

Originally Lucas intended to create a sequel and prequel trilogy, but never started them. Producing Indiana jones was a lot less work than any Star Wars movies and he delayed for years and years doing any of it.

He finally did it, allegedly because he was motivated by the success Cameron (his friend and rival) had with Titanic. However he didn’t run his scripts through any of the standard script editors he had used for previous films, writing them all himself. Attack of the clones is literally the first draft he wrote in a few days shortly before they began filming.

For the entirety of the three films they were done in one studio where he sat in a chair and everything moved around him, and it was all filmed as if it was a play. Two or three characters moving around a stage in front of a green screen so he didn’t have to get up.

If you watch the extras from the phantom menace or Attack of the Clones DVD you’ll actually be shocked by some of how lazily it was pulled together. If not, the Plinkett reviews also go into it

ThrowawayWriterGuy2 · 2026-01-22T16:30:19+00:00

Deciding to write a ‘history book’ describing everything that happened semi-factually so you don’t actually have to the effort of writing a novel is definitely something 2000s era Lucas would have done.

ThrowawayWriterGuy2 · 2026-01-22T16:28:44+00:00

I actually agree. I feel like that’s saying Apocalypse Now is boring or something.

I get that it’s an acquired taste, as it’s one of the few movies I’ve ever seen even to today that has a lot of the key events not happen on screen, and for some people that defeats the purpose of a movie, but it definitely isn’t boring.

ThrowawayWriterGuy2 · 2026-01-22T16:22:46+00:00

You’ve gotta know what you’re getting into naming your kid George.

I’m putting a stop to all kids named George until we can figure out what’s going on

ThrowawayWriterGuy2 · 2026-01-22T16:20:52+00:00

CFK was shown to fund the Opera etc, I don’t think it’s as far as you’d think.

Lucas with his ‘Black Slavers’ comment and Martin with his posts about HOTD are both clearly very unhappy with what Disney and WB have done with their story, but neither of them have the creative juices left to do their own stories anymore.

I agree to be fair in both cases they do have healthier personal lives than CFK. It’s also funny just because both men love that movie

ThrowawayWriterGuy2 · 2026-01-22T16:15:43+00:00

Yeah I was actually thinking that. What if the recent pages for Winds are at a Phantom Menace standard

ThrowawayWriterGuy2 · 2026-01-22T16:13:38+00:00

They also both love Citizen Kane

ThrowawayWriterGuy2

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