Trois choses font quel que soit le français est de "blog post"

[andrewducker]

1) I went to a friend's place to play board games today. He was an MSP until a fortnight ago, when his party did too well for him to be elected*. It turned out that I was running a week early, but we ended up playing board games anyway. He was just back from a conference involving people from the International Criminal Court, and we ended up playing a proper wargame* based around the Spanish civil war, about which I know absolutely nothing except that Franco won. When I finish my re-read of The Baroque Cycle I think that improving my education in that area might be next.

2) My mother's sister is dying. She lives*** in London, and Julie and I will be down there Wednesday/Thursday to see The Wall, so I phoned home this evening to suggest that we could go and see her in the hospice. But apparently she's now reached the stage where she's not really aware of her visitors, and I've been advised by my mum that it's not worth it for her sake. As I haven't had much contact with that side of my family for about 15 years I don't feel the need to see her for _my_ sake, so we're not going to. I feel slightly sad about it, but more for my mother's sake than anything else. This will be the first person of my parent's generation that I've lost to old-age**** and it feels like this is probably the start of a trend. My paren't retiring was a big thing in some ways - I hope that they'll be around for a fair while yet, but they're definitely now in the "old" camp.

3) Game of Thrones continues to be awesome. Even my parents like it. I'm wondering though - if you were a television exec would you invest lots of money in a TV series based on a series of books that weren't even finished yet unless you had either (a) a cast iron promise that the books would be finished before the TV series caught up or (b) permission to finish the TV series however you liked if you ran ahead of the books? And frankly (b) would just piss off a lot of the fans, so you have to wonder if they know something we don't. Like George RR Martin has the final two books finished, and was just having problems with the intermediate one. Because if not, that's a hell of a gamble to take with a lot of money...

*If you really want me to, I'll explain that.
**It had little cardboard counters with pictures of tanks on and everything.
***Insert tasteless joke here.
****Well, kinda - my aunt's husband died when I was very young, and I don't have any idea what of.

Comments

[matgb]

List member for the SNP then? Or possibly a Tory, but there was only one of them wasn't there?

Spanish CW is bonkers, I did more of the politics of it, but that was equally crazy.

Liked the anarchists though.

[andrewducker]

SNP on the Lothians List.

[andrewhickey.info]

Yeah, the anarchists were pretty cool - though I wonder how much of my thinking that is from reading Homage To Catalonia at an early age...

[interactiveleaf.livejournal.com]

Regarding #3, I've not read the books and am not watching the show, but I'm curious now to know if it's a miniseries or a series television show. If it's the former, like Lonesome Dove or Dune, your question almost makes sense, but I don't understand why "finishing the series" is all that important. They only filmed the first Dune book, didn't they? And if it's the latter, like Dexter or True Blood, I don't understand the objection at all; in those cases, the series isn't *supposed* to be exactly like the book, or to have any direct connection to the plot or number of books in the series.

Am I missing something obvious here?

[kmusser]

On #3, I'm guessing (b), although he's hinted that he has told the TV folks the basic outline of the books he hasn't written yet.

[matgb]

Dune has an ending.

Game of Thrones book one is pretty much setup. Hell, book 5 is still setup. It's perfect for a 10 year long TV series.

[fearmeforiampink]

I was confused for a moment on the MSP thing, then I worked it out – your friend was a List MSP, and the party got so many Constituency MSPs that they didn't get many top up List ones, and thus they didn't get downto him.

In other news, your second asterisked point (proper wargame) is missing its second asterisk.

[andrewducker]

It's more like Lord Of The Rings, only they started making the movie trilogy before The Return Of The King was written.

[andrewducker]

Correct!

And I'll go fix that now.

[interactiveleaf.livejournal.com]

That was exactly the analogy I was going to use when I next pestered you about it. OK, now I understand; thanks.

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

Re 3: I just assumed that everyone hoped the first series would be sufficiently profitable/aesthetically successful, and they'd cross that bridge when they came to it. After all you'd think a major television network would realise that you can't make N seasons of lost or heroes or X-Files balanced exactly at the point of revelation at the end of the first series, and that if they wanted to make more, they should plan a multi-series arc in advance, rather than scrambling to make it mysterious without revealing anything for another N series -- but apparently they don't.

[bohemiancoast.livejournal.com]

I think they -- know how the plot turns out, reckon there's plenty of time for the last two books to be written (and there's lots of evidence to suggest that Martin was stuck on *one particular thing* rather than stuck in general), and have done a deal with Martin that sticks him with some stonking penalties if he doesn't get his finger out.

[randomchris.livejournal.com]

Regarding #3 - when did they make the first Harry Potter movie, again? I recall fairly stringent details of everyone getting told the essential elements of the plot by JKR, but only once they'd signed the strictest non-disclosure agreements ever drawn up. I suspect the same has happened here - Martin will have the plot drawn out broadly, but the specifics and details are what takes the writing time.

[andrewducker]

That's a very good point! Of course, JK managed seven books in nine years (1998-2007), whereas it's taken fifteen years to get the first five books out of A Song Of Ice And Fire.

If the TV series gets to the end first, will the book fans watch it, or wait for the books to come out? Oh, the fun that would cause...

[andrewducker]

I do hope that it was just one thing. He seemed to manage the first three books in a timely manner, with just two years apiece. It was the next pair that seemed to beflummox him, so hopefully he's now back on track and knows what he needs to do next.

[fub.livejournal.com]

#2: My dad turned 70 last year. My mom'll be turning 65 at the end of the month. Suddenly it hit me that they are "old" as well. Weird, that.
#3: Fullmetal Alchemist was animated before the manga was completely finished -- at some time, it started to diverge from the manga, which did piss off the die-hard manga fans. So they made a remake which did follow the whole manga (which had been completed by that time), with a bigger budget. Everybody won.

[desperance.livejournal.com]

it's taken fifteen years to get the first five books out of A Song Of Ice And Fire.

More to the point, it's taken eleven years to get the latest two.

And there are children in the cast, who need still to be children for a while yet, if not all through the series.

I guess the TV people are hoping to make their profit early on, and never mind if they never get to finish. There are all sorts of other reasons in any case, why they might never get to make the whole thing; and authorial failure-to-deliver can be insured against...

[bohemiancoast.livejournal.com]

Yes, but book 4 has the stories of half the characters in it -- and he did that because he was stuck on the other half of the stories -- ie, the ones in the new book. So the entire delay has been this one thing.

[apostle-of-eris.livejournal.com]

If and when you get to Spain, you will quickly find that there even more axes being ground than you already thought.
There used to be a mention in the Encyclopedia Britannica (a citation I've unfortunately lost) saying that the single largest factor in Franco's victory was Stalin's treachery against the anarchists.

Back in the early 90's, when the walls went down, Yale University sent a flying team of historians to excavate the Kremlin archives. (Which tightened up significantly a few years later.) One of the books which resulted, Spain Betrayed: The Soviet Union in the Spanish Civil War, confirmed every nasty thing anyone had ever said about the Bolsheviks. It's way too fussy and detailed to be of interest to you if you haven't read 10 or 20 other books first, but whenever you find a positive claim about the Comintern in Spain, it's false.

The most famous book is probably Orwell's Homage to Catalonia. He later said that if he'd know in the first place what he learned while he was there, he'd have gone and joined the anarchist troops immediately.

(partisan? moi?)