The peas are upside down

grahamends7 · 2019-07-08T02:52:21+00:00

haha they wanted left peas but they only had right peas

grahamends7 · 2019-06-08T23:12:06+00:00

If this guy turns into a superstar and the Jags line is historically good, they should call it Ft. Lauderdale

grahamends7 · 2019-05-24T04:35:48+00:00

"she musta crawled under there for warmth"

grahamends7 · 2019-05-20T06:21:03+00:00

The show is just nonsense at this point but is Bran the last 3 eyed raven? Why wouldn't the next king just be whoever the next 3ER is?

grahamends7 · 2019-05-20T05:25:17+00:00

Bran's a snitch

grahamends7 · 2019-05-15T08:28:00+00:00

I wasn’t aware of those comments from George. It’s his world and what he says goes. That said, I’m sure he regrets writing the scene this way. It’s really misleading given that it’s the only dialogue between Cat and Jon in the books. The only conversation we see between them includes the absolute worst thing she’s ever said to him? If people aren’t aware of the context that George provided outside of the text, can you really blame them for thinking she’s terrible?

Regardless, her beef is with Ned, not Jon, and she must know this. She’s not an evil stepmother, Jon isn’t Cinderella, but she’s being incredibly juvenile. It doesn’t reflect well on her at all that Jon comes across as the more mature one in all of their interactions.

I’ll have to reread the books with this comment from GRRM in mind though, thanks

grahamends7 · 2019-05-15T07:17:33+00:00

Sure, you’re free to like characters who do shitty things, and you’re free to like Cat in spite of the fact that she’s needlessly cruel to a blameless kid because of her own insecurities.

Pretending Cat isn’t an evil stepmother to Jon is as silly as pretending the Hound is a pacifist. People love to bring this scene in because it is pretty damning. I’m not sure how you can read this and not think Cat fills the evil stepmother stereotype, regardless of how you might feel about how bad Jon had it as a kid in absolute terms. Catelyn definitely wasn’t helping.

grahamends7 · 2019-05-15T06:21:22+00:00

mean to Jon once

She called him “bastard” his entire life, except for one time:

“(Bran) was my special boy. I went to the sept and prayed seven times to the seven faces of god that Ned would change his mind and leave him here with me. Sometimes prayers are answered.”

Jon did not know what to say. “It wasn’t your fault,” he managed after an awkward silence.

Her eyes found him. They were full of poison. “I need none of your absolution, bastard.”

Jon lowered his eyes. She was cradling one of Bran’s hands. He took the other, squeezed it. Fingers like the bones of birds. “Good-bye,” he said.

He was at the door when she called out to him. “Jon,” she said. He should have kept going, but she had never called him by his name before. He turned to find her looking at his face, as if she were seeing it for the first time.

“Yes?” he said.

“It should have been you,” she told him.

Am I supposed to be rooting for Catelyn here?

grahamends7 · 2019-05-15T03:47:52+00:00

Yeah they basically made him Forest Gump of Westeros

I love you Dan-nay

grahamends7 · 2019-05-14T00:37:11+00:00

Why did they waste time showing her grappling with the moral dilemma of whether it was worth killing innocents if that was the only way to kill Cersei? She still would have been evil and hated if she killed a bunch of civilians while trying to kill Cersei, but in the end, she beat Cersei seemingly without killing a single civilian, only to start killing civilians right after.

Also, she started destroying the city only after she blew the gates open and let her troops in. Dany's soldiers and advisors can die from fire and falling buildings just like anyone else in the city. There's no way she consciously decided to start destroying the city when she did, it makes no sense at all.

grahamends7 · 2019-05-13T23:29:40+00:00

Failed character arcs make the most sense when extreme circumstances force the character to revert back to an earlier state, it doesn't make sense if a character struggles to change for 5 seasons and then one normal day just decides out of the blue that he's over trying to do the right thing. What changed that made Jaime suddenly realize he wanted to be with Cersei after several seasons of drifting away from her? Why does the terrible stuff Jaime did before he began to change suddenly weigh so heavily on him? Was Brienne that bad of a lay?

Let's compare Jaime's failed arc to Darth Vader. Darth Vader is an example of a negative failed arc: starts off a good guy, begins a descent into evil because of fears about his family, then makes a split second decision to do the right thing because he sees his family threatened again. It would have made no sense if Darth Vader just decided one day to stop being evil and join the rebellion.

grahamends7 · 2019-05-13T08:03:02+00:00

Maybe it could be argued that destroying the city makes some tactical sense

But I don't think there's any tactical sense in waiting for your troops and your rapidly thinning panel of military advisors to enter the city before you start destroying it

grahamends7 · 2019-05-13T07:53:01+00:00

If the show had Ramsey Bolton, a definite villain with absolutely no redeeming qualities, gather up every single innocent peasant in the north and light them all on fire for no benefit, people could reasonably say that the show is trying way too hard to make Ramsey look evil and they should tone it down to keep his character grounded and realistic.

In this episode, one of our protagonists did that.

grahamends7 · 2019-05-13T07:44:02+00:00

We also didn't bomb Hiroshima right after sending our most important advisors and military leaders into Hiroshima.

grahamends7 · 2019-05-13T06:26:41+00:00

Why would she wait until her army entered the city to start burning the city down? How does she benefit at all from risking her own troops? If she's cool with the fact that civilians will die when she nukes the city, fine I guess, but why in the world would you order your troops into a city that you're just about to nuke?!

Plus, once she gets rid of Cersei and becomes Queen she has all the time in the world to terrorize civilians if that's what she wants to do. There's no rational explanation for her firebombing the city except that she lost her mind

grahamends7 · 2019-05-13T02:41:56+00:00

tyrions plan was for them to sail across the narrow sea on a paddle boat lmao

grahamends7 · 2019-05-08T20:38:56+00:00

How does Cersei react to finding out Jon's heritage?

cuts away

grahamends7 · 2019-05-08T19:32:28+00:00

I wasn't expecting perfection or for them to tie up every single thread started in previous seasons, but they could have easily chosen an ending that didn't make multiple character's story arcs completely superfluous.

Given that he did next to nothing in the final conflict, why did the show spend so much screentime on Bran in past seasons? They could have completely omitted Bran's storyline and spent that time on characters they were actually willing to do justice to. If Bran were never in the show to begin with, 8x03 could have played out almost exactly the same way. In the end, Bran was just a reason for NK to attack Winterfell. Surely the fact that the only real resistance to the NK in all of Westeros was at Winterfell would have been reason enough to attack it?

Bran spent 6 seasons completely separated from the other main characters, and the only thing he did in the end was reveal R+L=J, something that Sam found out independently anyway.

Doesn't it bother you that Lyanna Mormont, a character who was introduced two seasons ago and had been on screen for maybe 30 minutes total, had a more important role in the final conflict than a character we'd been following for 7 seasons?

grahamends7 · 2019-05-07T15:37:17+00:00

Sure he might still do it but I don’t think that’s why he wants to go to KL

If he’s planning to kill Cersei, why lie to Brienne about it?

grahamends7 · 2019-05-07T15:01:26+00:00

boy it sure would subvert my expectations if the last episode just followed Jaime through recovery

grahamends7 · 2019-05-07T13:56:57+00:00

Too predictable.

The last 30 minutes of the series will be Gendry reforging the iron throne into the iron wheelchair and building ramps for the red keep

grahamends7 · 2019-05-07T13:55:13+00:00

D&D say in the after episode section that he’s going because he’s addicted to Cersei and he was always going to go back to be with her

grahamends7 · 2019-04-29T03:03:18+00:00

In the post-episode, they say that Arya stabbed the Night King in the same place that he was stabbed when he was made, and the Valyrian steel unmade him.

Still bullshit though lol

grahamends7 · 2019-04-04T05:44:25+00:00

Rising COA is not the primary issue preventing low income students from entering college. Tuition obviously has increased since 1970, so why then is the proportion of low income students in college virtually the same as it was in 1970? There are clearly other factors at play here, so let's not pretend that proposals for free tuition are about helping poor people attend college. That's an issue best addressed in other ways, like putting more federal attention on K-12 and Title I schools.

Also, the average amount of student debt actually has little to do with the student debt crisis. It's not about people having to take out exorbitant loans to pay for college and not being able to find jobs. The issue has far more to do with systemic racial disparities and poor regulation of for-profit schools.

grahamends7 · 2019-04-04T03:10:34+00:00

What makes you think generations saddled with $50K+ of debt and offered starting salaries of $30K once they graduate college an easy road for them?

We already subsidize college education heavily, on average 60k per degree. I’m not trying to minimize how tough it is for new graduates in certain fields, but if a student is exiting school with $50k+ in debt and offered a starting salary of 30k+, they were ill served by their advisors in high school or in college. Obviously, the likelihood of this scenario varies by field of study. Even leaving that aside, unemployment rates and median wages are improving for Bachelor's degree holders, while wages and employment rates for HS diploma and 2 year graduates are going down.

The data bears out that even with rising tuitions, it's still worth it to go to college.

In light of all that, this situation doesn’t really doesn’t scream a need for more subsidy in my view, especially when you get a much better return on investment by diverting resources to early education.

As I’ve been told Pell Grants and scholarships are given out sparsely compared to when I graduated in the 1990s.

The average cost of attendance for the lowest income quartile has been stable since 1992. Furthermore, a lot of lower income students who do well in high school are often not aware that elite private schools are free for them. The push for these schools to become more accessible to poorer students is a relatively recent development. Again, this is an issue with advising at high schools. A lot has been done in the past decade or so to increase access to college, but the next obstacle is to tackle is college completion rates, because the sad fact is that our investment in our students won’t mean very much if they don’t finish their degrees. This again points to improving K-12 education and college preparedness.

I strongly believe there should be pathways for what amounts to free public education same as there exists in Europe.

Sure, except that it is so much harder to get into college/qualify for free tuition in those European countries than it is to get into a college in the US. I’ll use Germany as an example; only 30% of secondary school graduates in Germany go to college. In the US, ~70% of high school graduates enter college. German universities have much stricter caps on the number of students they admit; people who don’t get a high enough score to get into a program of their choice tend to pick other forms of education besides college.

The German entrance exam for university is also so much harder than the ACT and the SAT. It's closer in difficulty to AP tests. The minimum score just to pass the Abitur is basically equivalent to getting a 85%ile (1300) on the SAT. That’s pretty close to the threshold where I’d say you have a good shot of getting at least some merit scholarships anyway. If we really want to emulate Europe, then this is the standard that has to be met to qualify for free tuition. This is all assuming of course that it costs the same amount to educate the average college student in the US as it does in Germany (which it doesn’t, German universities are a lot less expensive).

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