The Sphere

Also watching Agents of SHIELD again. It's still fine but nothing special. Quake's seeming refusal to use her powers in situation's where there's no one who would really see her and using them wouldn't negatively affect her team and would probably deal with the "bad guys" easily has gotten really annoying over the length of the show. But I still enjoy Coulson.

Oh, I also forgot about the Harley Quinn series, which I've watched as it was airing. Fantastic little comedy show that came as a real surprise to me from DC. Feels almost like a spin-off of Batman TAS but twisted and warped in ways that make for a lot of fun. It takes a lot of risks and brings characters to the forefront that just absolutely make no sense being there. This show makes Kite-Man likeable, and I even felt sympathy for his story.  Fucking KITE-MAN. It also brought back Condiment King from TAS, lots of references to that show as well as to other Batman(+other DC) properties.

One complaint is that Harley's accent is inconsistent, which I can't entirely tell is on purpose (the Jersey dialect did seem to come back more when dealing with her own family, and in some other tense situations for her), or if it was just inconsistent VA work (Kaley Cuoco, who's also an EP through her company, Yes, Norman) or if it was inconsistent directing.

But overall, the show has been a lot of fun. There's been interesting takes on all the characters, mostly villains. But even the hero side is there and parodied  well, particularly Batgirl, Gordon, Alfred, and Bruce/Batman, and even a bit of fun with Damian Wayne as Robin. The show parodies a lot but most of it doesn't feel like it sits outside of how the characters have been portrayed in other media (Commissioner Gordon might be the exception, he's really exaggerated, but it's fun).

I really do think that Harley and Ivy really are best together, without Joker, even if they're just friends or if they're romantic. Seriously, fuck Joker.

I can't believe I haven't started watching the last season of Legends. Despite my enjoyment of it, it's like all the other CW shows; I like them, but I don't love them anymore. I have tried to get into Stargirl (phrasing), but I just can't bring myself to care enough about it to stay on top of it (again, phrasing).

To my shock, an hour after I posted that comment, i saw it was announced that Stargirl was picked up for a season 2 and will move to CW.

I keep thinking about going back to Animal Crossing, especially now with the added swimming stuff, the art, they keep adding stuff. But I paid off my loans and kind of lost interest at that point, and the fact that the wife and I had to share an island is so fucking obnoxious (only one island per console, regardless of the number of players using the console).

Got an Xbox One, played through some FPSes, had fun, but now I'm pretty much just playing Cities Skylines. I don't like any of the other city-builders currently available on the platform. It's making me want to work on a gaming PC to try some others but I'm not sure when I'll have the money for something decent in that domain. Oh well, I'll keep doing Cities Skylines until I bore of it, I guess.

Still anxiously waiting for Hollow Knight: Silksong. I saw Xbox One is putting up some demos for a week later this month and I'm hoping it will be in the lineup but I'm also not going to hold my breath. It has been at game shows in the past year already as a playable demo, but that's a very different environment to playing demos at home.

Whatever it is, apparently the Amazon LOTR series will cover the Second Age going by the maps they showed on Twitter. I'm not very thrilled about this, since it's a fairly spaced out time frame without a lot of focused narrative...that means a bunch of ad-lib without the constraint of a known and proven story. Would it suck if it just did it's own thing in the fantasy setting? Not necessarily, but how much of the setting would there be to appeal to fans of the Silmarillion who are likely jonesing for an actual adaptation of First Age stuff?


I don't think they are going to cover the entirety of the Second Age, for the reasons you mentioned. My guess at the most reasonable choice is a bit before the War of the Last Alliance. Gives room to establish characters before going into giant battle seasons.

I'm kind of hopeful that it'll be the lead-up to

Whatever they do I hope they recreate the Fingolfin vs Mordoth fight. That's my top one, book narration included. Ive had a painting of it as my computer background for years now and I even had a poster of another one :3

It's going to be mostly second age, based on what little promo we've seen since then. They might do something similar to the films, where we saw the end of the Siege of Barud-dûr as part of a recap of former events. Even if that's all we get, would be cool to see that, and the death of Glaurung, the fall of Gondolin, the Battle of Sudden Flame and more, even if it's from a big view and not down in the details of it. More likely in such a preview we'll get some of the War of Wrath as that was the last big event of the First Age, followed by Beleriand sinking into the sea and Númenor being established, likely some of the events that take place in Númenor before whenever the show's setting starts (rather than all of the biggest battles of the War of Beleriand).