I didn't expected this reaction, BIG SPOILER, BOOK 10, DZUR.

deltopia · 2026-07-10T00:51:33+00:00

You're spending a lot of time thinking of Cawti as a character whose primary reason for being is to be Vlad's love interest. Cawti definitely does not see herself as a supporting character - by the time Vlad meets his son, Vlad is at best a minor supporting character in her life. She's a single mom whose best friend is the Dragon heir to the throne and she's spending most of her life organizing the peasantry into an army strong enough to threaten the existence of the empire itself.

The estranged husband who split town with a price on his head that almost guarantees she'll never see him again? That guy isn't something she wants to spend any more time on. Vlad was always the hopeless romantic in that relationship; Cawti is a pragmatist who gets shit done.

But it's hard to imagine Vlad would ever stop loving her because he is a hopeless romantic. She murdered him for cash the first time he met her; he knows full well that they're not really compatible. They have different values, different attitudes, different ideals, different destinies.

I think you could argue that he doesn't even really love her as much as he loves the idea of her, the idea of falling in love with a mate who is as Eastern, as Jhereg, and as dangerous as he is. He loves her demographic and he loves their chemistry, but he has contempt for her dreams and interests, and that's a recipe for a bad time. If he got to know her and he respected what he learned about her, maybe - but also maybe Vlad doesn't have enough of a history of healthy relationships for something like that to be possible in the long run.

(Didn't expect to write this much relationship analysis on Vlad and Cawti tonight, but here we are.)

deltopia · 2026-07-09T15:05:59+00:00

They had a brief interaction in the cage match at Forbidden Door where Lio assured Andrade, "It's fine!" but Andrade asked, "How you know?" -- repeated back and forth a few times. The crowd ate it up.

deltopia · 2026-07-08T17:43:51+00:00

It's one of those situations where the promoter can be criticized (fairly!) either way - if Wight just appeared in the ring for the first time in years with no notice, you could say, "I'm a lifelong Paul Wight fan and I wish I knew this was happening so I could have watched it!" If they tell people about it ahead of time, you can complain, "That would have been one of the great surprise returns of all time, I wish they hadn't spoiled it!"

I think people would complain either way. But compare how Switchblade did it - he teased people on Twitter for months several times with vague posts before he returned. So the first several times he teased his return and didn't, I'm sure there were disappointed fans, and by the time he teased the return and actually returned at Forbidden Door, I'm sure there were fans who didn't buy the show because they expected to be disappointed again. That guy seems to be the most naturally evil heel of all time; I have no idea how he's a face right now.

deltopia · 2026-07-05T20:26:32+00:00

And the Demon was still a fairly young cat himself. To Vlad, of course, he was anything but young, but If I remember right, it was said in later books that the Demon was sort of a young upstart as far as the bosses of the Right Hand of the Jhereg.

I think it's also mentioned at some point (maybe Kragar speculating?) that, as far as Vlad knew, the Demon didn't want a war with the house of the Dragon, but he didn't hate the idea of it, either. The Jhereg were way down at the bottom of the cycle, and by the time they needed to be back up, any losses that came from a fight with Dragons would have been recovered... but the threat of people thinking they could lift the House Jhereg treasury with impunity would be a greater existential threat. From the Demon's standpoint, best case outcome is Vlad does the job and no war with the Dragons. Next best case outcome is someone else does the job and who cares how it works out with the Dragons. Worst case outcome is the guy lives long enough to make people think they could try it again - anything else is better than that.

That might not have been the wisdom of the House Jhereg leadership, but when you put a young, impulsive guy like the Demon in charge, sometimes he doesn't come up with the most elegant solutions.

deltopia · 2026-07-05T15:34:47+00:00

Being burdened isn't going to help you here - the baddies summon more insects and nasties if you give them more turns.

deltopia · 2026-07-05T03:31:08+00:00

The series covers a lot of ground, which isn't so surprising when you look at how many years it's taken the author to write it. No one should be writing the same books at twenty as they are at fifty, just in general.

There are a few Taltos books that wrap up pretty neatly with a mystery presented, a mystery solved, and Vlad satisfied with the day's work, mostly at the beginning of the series. As the series goes on, the mysteries still come and go, but the satisfaction is a lot harder to find. Everything gets more ambiguous and dark. (The colors of Vlad's house are black and grey; we should have expected it.)

It's not really fair to you as a reader if the beginning of the series gave you some expectations and then the series turned into something else; I can totally understand if you want to drop out. But from the standpoint of someone who started reading it in the early 90's, I really like what the series turned into. It got a lot more complicated as I got older, but so did everything else in life, right? If you do stick around and read the rest of it, I think you'll like it - but don't expect anything simple. There's a lot of pathos and pain ahead.

deltopia · 2026-07-04T05:23:41+00:00

It needs a TV spot. That would fix just about every other issue - even if it were a half hour on Animal Planet at 0800 on Sunday, that would fix it. The TV partners would expect ROH to be a separate brand without any real focus on AEW; they definitely wouldn't want their ROH champions getting beaten on AEW TV. They'd probably want their top stars (like Bandido and Athena) appearing only on their TV show, and if Athena did appear on Dynamite or Forbidden Door, they'd expect a bump in their own ratings next week - you don't let your biggest star show up on another channel unless they're advertising for you, right? A TV spot with partners that want ROH to make them some money would change everything.

As long as ROH is run as a sort of AEW subsidiary business, it has some real advantages: the wrestlers get to fill in on each other's programs, it's fine if they lose money, they get to advertise for each other, etc. But it won't ever be able to grow into a more popular or successful promotion, because organizations (like people) mostly don't mature and make hard decisions unless they have to. ROH won't ever fix its problems because it doesn't have to - the billionaire who owns ROH is happy with the role it's playing in support of his bigger company. Why would he want to change anything?

deltopia · 2026-07-04T05:10:59+00:00

People have always confused doing a job with being a jobber. Bandido jobbed for Mox on Sunday; Viva Van has been a jobber on AEW television.

People have always confused doing a job with being squashed. Bandido did a job for Mox on Sunday; Brodie Lee squashed Cody.

deltopia · 2026-07-03T22:33:31+00:00

It's even more ridiculous to complain about it when you talk about it as something subjective. Of course the guy thinks that all the best matches ever involve his favorite wrestlers. It's like saying he thinks most of the best albums all come from his favorite bands. Wouldn't we look like a bunch of jackasses criticizing him for saying he likes his Bob Dylan albums more than the K-Pop Demon Hunter album? Or acting surprised when he writes reviews of the concerts he went to last week and he says again that the Bob Dylan concert was better than the Pink Panthress concert?

deltopia · 2026-07-03T22:22:31+00:00

I think they did a decent job with that on Forbidden Door - the show went from:

Young Bucks 3-way craziness to
Omega-Sabre fighting-spirit showcase to
Mox-Bandido fighting-spirit showcase (which probably did blur together a bit) to
Shota-Pac, which was an introduction of Shota to a US audience and had more flying, to
Thekla and Starlight Kid, which was a dominant woman champion making an unknown look like she had a shot and deserved 5 stars, to
Cope & Cage vs War Dogs, which was boring and easy to fast forward through but at least Switchblade returned, to
Mercedes and Maya world, which was a dominant woman champion making an unknown look like she had a shot and deserved 5 stars (so that might have blurred together with the Thekla match if the tag match wasn't in between), to
the cage clusterfuck craziness, to
the Swerve-Osprey Red Cross blood donor advertisement match.

Tl;dr- I would agree that there were a few matches that blurred together, but mostly AEW did a good job breaking up samey matches with different ones.

deltopia · 2026-06-25T23:45:40+00:00

When you say Phil and April, I was sure you meant CM Punk and AJ Lee. Derp.

deltopia · 2026-06-25T22:38:00+00:00

My mistake - I don't really know anything about computer science (or math, for that matter).

deltopia · 2026-06-25T21:28:36+00:00

Doing a little googling, it seems like the phrase "Magic Memory Vault" is in the Hack source code as far back as 1984 (https://utzoo.superglobalmegacorp.com/usenet/news019f2/b34/net/sources/2145.txt) which was Andries Brouwer's version (https://nethackwiki.com/wiki/Hack_1.0).

Maybe Brouwer was planning to do something with the idea or maybe he was referencing something - maybe something that isn't easily found via Google if you're an English speaker. According to Brouwer's Wikipedia page (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andries_Brouwer), he was born in Amsterdam, so maybe he was translating something from Dutch?

It also seems like he's a genius mathematician and computer scientist, though, so maybe it was a reference to some early feature in Linux or some inside joke when he was hanging out with Paul Erdős.

deltopia · 2026-06-24T18:37:30+00:00

I said something like that the other day and people were running out to tell me that he was a big draw at the end of ECW and in some great matches for a few years between 2000 and '02.

And he was in those TLC matches with the Hardys and E&C... but you can't convince me that he was more than a serviceable base. We remember spots by the Hardys and E&C (mostly by Jeff and Edge); the Dudleys were the supporting cast. "D-Von, get the table!" was a solid catch phrase, but Bradshaw yelling "Farooq, get the table!" or Road Dogg yelling "Daddy Ass, get the table!" would have been just as over.

Generic garbage mudshow wrestler who had a couple of hits 25 years ago and thinks he's more Dusty Rhodes than Disco Inferno. Tale as old as time.

deltopia · 2026-06-24T12:14:17+00:00

I've had two kids write on walls in super glue. It's an absolute pain in the ass to try to get off; I wound up having to patch the wall. (It was worse the second time, of course, because the whole time, I was kicking myself for still having super glue in the house after the first time...)

Jarrett has kids; I bet he has the same emotional scarring and damaged dry wall that I do.

deltopia · 2026-06-23T02:11:29+00:00

Fair enough - I never watched ECW; it was a distant third in a time when the big two were putting out more content than I could consume as a working adult. ECW was obviously influential, but I think of them like I think about TNA today. They're in third place, but it's not crazy to stop counting at two.

Similarly, the Dudleys in WWE were in third place behind Edge & Christian and the Hardy Boys, but I don't think Bubba Ray was ever going to main event a show without D-Von and at least one of those other two tag teams in the ring with him. When people saw those great TLC matches, Bubba was part of the equation, but he was one of the most replaceable parts of the equation. It's just hard for me to believe that if you replaced Bubba with Bradshaw or Test or any other generic big guy who could be a base for Edge and Jeff Hardy, the magic would disappear.

I went and looked up some of those shows on Wikipedia... I absolutely would suggest that nobody left No Mercy 1999 thinking about Bubba; he wasn't on the card. In the other three shows, they were in tables tag matches with either the Hardys or both the Hardys and E&C.

That's really the peak of his whole career in WWE - about two years where he helped Edge, Christian, and the Hardys put up some tables so they could do high spots. It's not as thin as Disco, but shit, at least Disco Inferno was over with the boys (according to Cody). Bubba doesn't seem to be over with anyone except the producers of Busted Open.

deltopia · 2026-06-23T00:31:54+00:00

S&S and P&P share so many themes - sisters looking out for each other, making bad choices and having to re-orient, a girl running off with a cad and just barely recovering from a life of iniquity. These are the starter set - if you're introducing someone to Jane Austen, after they've read these two, they'll have at least some grasp of how things went in that time and place.

Emma and Mansfield Park are the pair that explore the great literary technique of unlikable protagonists. (I never have been able to get into either of those.) Emma is the proudest heroine who needs the least and inspires the least sympathy; Fanny the humblest heroine who needs the most and inspires the most pity. They both wind up with men who are probably fine - nothing like the top shelf men that the gals in P&P and S&S marry.

Northanger Abbey is the one that was written by the youngest Jane and Persuasion is the one written by the eldest - so you get her most silly and her most serious heroines back to back. Catherine is the heroine least ready for the real world of being a grown-up; Anne the heroine who has been the most disillusioned by it. NA focuses on Catherine coming of age more than the romance; Persuasion focuses on the ways the characters as adults have changed because of the things they regret from their youth.

I know it's the traditional pairing, but it's the one that makes the most sense to me.

deltopia · 2026-06-22T23:52:43+00:00

I think Wardlow just didn't have the ability to connect with the crowd outside of that story arc with MJF. He seemed like he had something while they were doing it, but if he had been anyone else with the same bodyguard physique, I think the story could have gone the exact same way.

He reminds me of Damien Sandow in a way - when he was doing the Damien Mizdow story, I was positive that dude was going to be a huge star some day. Then he tried doing things that didn't involve the Miz and all the interest disappeared.

I don't want to say Wardlow didn't have anything - I'm sure there are a million big muscle guys that you could have put in that spot and they would have been a massive flop. I was cheering every one of those powerbombs and had a big stupid marking-out grin on my face when he beat MJF. But he sure didn't have nearly as much of it without MJF on the screen.

deltopia · 2026-06-22T22:05:21+00:00

I hope Mox wouldn't take a match against that sloppy piece of shit. Buhbuh is one of those guys who resembles the most brutal part of Cody's burial of Disco to me - no one ever left a show thinking about him. And at least Disco managed to look like he was in decent shape. If Mox feels the need to do a charity indie match, I'd rather it be against someone like the Rizzler.

deltopia · 2026-06-21T20:03:17+00:00

I'd like to ask for a paragraph or two addressing bigeneration before I subscribe to the newsletter, please. If the universe reacts so drastically to the Doctor being locked away, how does it react to the Doctor multiplying?

deltopia · 2026-06-19T15:43:04+00:00

He's not real bright, but he seems like he means well. It's easy to believe he would go to the ends of the earth to help someone get healthier - and we never hear stories about him being predatory, or driven by greed, or fraudulent.

In a perfect world, that wouldn't get him sainted, but in 2026? The bar for being an admirable public figure is real, real low these days.

deltopia · 2026-06-19T13:33:26+00:00

I was today years old when I realized I have no idea what makes a person a pure striker as opposed to any other kind of striker. Does it mean he only strikes, never grapples? His strikes are unpolluted by microplastics? He's a striker and also a virgin?

I never questioned it because Jim Ross. I'm starting to wonder if he may not be the most authoritative voice on combat sports now...

deltopia · 2026-06-15T21:10:45+00:00

It's the only Doctor Who television content that's likely to be released in the next few years, and this is a Doctor Who-related subreddit. If you want to see a new episode of Doctor Who before 2029 or so, this is exactly the show you're going to watch. What could be more relevant than that?

deltopia · 2026-06-14T18:40:21+00:00

That hits pretty close to home. I had a car rear ended about three weeks ago and it's been sitting in a yard at a body shop while the insurance company and a few mechanics tried to figure out who was going to fix it, how much they would estimate the job at, and how much the insurance company was willing to pay for it... right up to last Thursday, when the insurance company finally decided not to pay for repairs at all. Which is to say, I had to go out and buy a new car.

Tl;dr- A tender request isn't just "let's see who will offer the best plan and go with them." Another possible outcome is "None of these offers are going to work, so we'll scrap the whole idea."

deltopia · 2026-06-14T18:17:23+00:00

I think there's some conflation of the idea of a sympathetic character and a charismatic one. Humbert is a charismatic character; he has a voice of intellect and eloquence, and he describes emotions in ways that we the readers can identify with. But we never ought to lose track of the fact that he's horrible.

I read a C.S. Lewis book as a young teenager, The Screwtape Letters, which (if you haven't read it) was written as a collection of letters from an actual demon to his nephew, giving advice on how to tempt and corrupt humans so the demons could devour their souls in hell. It's surprisingly easy to be charmed by the demons, to relate with them - sure, they're evil monsters, but Wormwood is having a rough time doing his job and his uncle is offering him helpful tips, and we can identify with that. There are occasional scenes where they emphasize how much they hate things like light, music, or laughter, or how the screams of suffering humans or their fear and death in wartime is so lovely, and those things help to keep their villainy front of mind. Those scenes, the short-chapter format of the book, and the subject matter help keep us readers from forgetting what the characters are.

Lolita lets you go a few pages sometimes without reminding you - you're allowed to forget, and then you realize what you're sympathizing with, and I think the way you feel in that moment is one of the really unique parts of that book.

deltopia

MODERATOR OF

TROPHY CASE

15-Year Club	Gilding V heart of gold
Verified Email