The cast of Blacklist was amazing. The writers, less so. They spent so much time telling us how brilliant Elizabeth was, but barely ever showed us. What they showed us most often is that the only way they knew to create conflict was to have her do the absolute stupidist thing possible in nearly every situation.
“I, Daniel Quinn, neither the first nor the last of a line of such Quinns, set eyes on Maud the wondrous on a late December day in 1849 on the banks of the river of aristocrats and paupers, just as the great courtesan, Magdalena Colon, also known as La Ultima, a woman whose presence turned men into spittling, masturbating pigs, boarded a skiff to carry her across the river’s icy water from Albany to Greenbush, her first stop en route to the city of Troy, a community of iron, where later that evening she was scheduled to enact, yet again, her role as the lascivious Lais, that fabled prostitute who spurned Demosthenes’ gold and yielded without fee to Diogenes the virtuous, impecunious tub-dweller.”
When my previous independent pharmacist went out of business, they transfered all of my prescriptions to the nearest Walgreens. I switched to another "independent" that was part of Rite-aid's network. The staff were poorly trained in customer service communications, passive aggressively taking control of every conversation and then not listening. I had multiple instances of prescriptions being lost or delayed, in one case for weeks. The owners didn't care why I as a customer found these experiences frustrating and eventually told me I should just go to Walgreen's. I did and the customer service has been so much better. Independent isn't always better.
The beauty of open source is that Google can't take it back. The worst they can do is close source their own future development. Meanwhile, the community can fork the last open source release of AOSP. Look at what open source devs did with Audacity, for example.
The real fly in the ointment here is Google already did with device trees and driver binaries for Pixel phones; no longer sharing these with AOSP will have a very chilling effect on custom ROM developers who must now reverse engineer needed configs and drivers.
There is a Batman villain or tragic anti-hero named "Manbat" whose real name is Kirk Langstrom. Perhaps Wayne Bruce was confused by being called by the name Langstrom's alter ego.
Frodo and the party at Weathertop - in the books Frodo shouts Elbereth's name as a war cry and stabs at a wraith, rather than cowering and falling down as in the film.
Ent moot results and dramatic reversal - in the books, the Ents knew what Saruman had been up to and decided to go to war at once. They didn't passively decide to do nothing then change their minds.
Faramir bringing Frodo and Sam (and the ring to Osgilath). In the books, Faramir recognized the threat the ring posed and let Sam, Frodo and Gollum go on with their quest without hinderance.
The books had no nonsensical scene with Gollum framing Sam for illicit lembas consumption.
The books had no stupid dwarf tossing jokes.
While Aragorn has periods of self doubt in the books, none of these inhibited him from taking action. In the film he has a long sequence of scenes where he's basically paralyzed by self doubt.
No scourging of the Shire in the films. These scenes were crucial to showing just how much each of the hobbits had developed as characters and in what ways.
I could go on, but hopefully these are sufficient to illustrate the point.
The films were great with respect to casting, cinematography, art design and location. Jackson and Boyens seemed to have forgotten however that Tolkien was the master and they the students with respect to writing.
You can also get extended service updates from Microsoft for at least a year. $30 for up to 15 computers, although there are also a couple of ways to get then free. 1000 bing rewards points, or enabling Backup to sync your settings to OneDrive are supposed to both means to get them that will become available soon.
Eh, it's no more problematic than the many canon retcons we've gotten. It may be there was an element on both earth and the Lanthanite homeworld that maintains Lanthanite immortality, but that element was lacking on Flint's planet.
It's an appealing theory, but how would you square it with the end episode reveal that Flint was no longer immortal since having left earth? Was McCoy just wrong when he reported that readings from the earlier tricorder scan show that Flint has been aging normally since he left Earth's environment, and will soon die?
We know little enough about Lanthanites in general, and Pelia in particular but it is implied that they are an alien race, so their long lifespan isn't likely to be linked to remaining on earth, unlike Flint's.
Perhaps it wasn't leaving earth that cancelled Flint's immortality, but some element on Holberg 917-G?
Regarding The example given in the article, lying to get out of a social obligation , memorize this phrase: "I have a prior commitment."
People seldom challenge it or ask for details. It isn't a lie, it is merely non-specific.
That prior commitment could be as simple as "I made a commitment to myself to not do things I don't feel like doing" or "I need to walk the dog" , descale the tea kettle or keep an appointment.
It's nobody's business but yours or perhaps your spouse's which applies.
"I was convinced up until the reveal that the "alien" was a sort of scavenging species 0 of the Borg, with the robotic look and the ability to adapt to phaser fire."
I suspected the Pakled myself. That would have been an even bigger tonal mismatch, so I was glad to find that I was wrong.
Totally agree about Mitchell. Rong Fu is really good in the role and deserves some love from the writers. Mitchell is a recurring character rather than a regular, so it may not be an apples to apples comparison but still, she's been there from the begining.
I felt this hard. I spent far too long this afternoon trying to get some useful troubleshooting ideas out of CoPilot for a baffling WordPress SVG problem, but it kept losing the plot. Live and learn.
The cast of Blacklist was amazing. The writers, less so. They spent so much time telling us how brilliant Elizabeth was, but barely ever showed us. What they showed us most often is that the only way they knew to create conflict was to have her do the absolute stupidist thing possible in nearly every situation.