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Game of Thrones Season 8: The Death of Hope

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I'm not going to swear an oath I can't uphold. When enough people make false promises, words stop meaning anything. Then there are no more answers, only better and better lies. - Jon Snow (GoT, Season 7, "The Dragon and the Wolf")  Countless takes have been written about Game of Throne 's final season, Season 8, since the final episode aired on May 19, 2019.  That said, my outrage is still fresh, and I have a perspective that I have not seen entirely covered elsewhere. As any fan of A Song of Ice and Fire knows, George RR Martin was and is still working on the sixth novel in the series , The Winds of Winter .  There is no official ending to the series, and there may not ever be.  Therefore, many fans of the novels took solace in the fact that Martin's intended ending would appear, in some form, in Season 8.  Flash forward to May 19, 2019, and the collective riot nearly took down the Internet (though actually the riot began the week before, after the episode, ...
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Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity: I Loved It, and I Feel Cheated

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Image: Nintendo This critique contains spoilers for Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity and The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild . I had not played video games for 25 years.   Then came The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild . The Legend of Zelda premiered in 1986 as an eight-bit top-down style adventure game for the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES).   It involved an elf-like warrior named Link wandering through the land of Hyrule, seeking out eight pieces of the Triforce of Wisdom in order to rescue Princess Zelda.   Critics lauded the game for its open world style of play, which took Link through mountains and forests in search of his objectives.   Over the decades, The Legend of Zelda would form a series with a cast of familiar characters and its own lore.     Breath of the Wild (2017) set off an earthquake in the Zelda franchise.   It took the open world concept of the first Zelda and turned it into a 3D experience where Link could climb on ne...
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Movie Musicals That Got It Wrong: Love Never Dies (Revisited)

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After completing my review of Love Never Dies , despite finding the Australian production boring, I became curious about the original London cast recording.  So I wasted perfectly good money in order to have a listen, and came to develop a rather twisted fascination with the recording, and the musical as a whole.  Not fascination as in I suddenly found it good, but in that I wondered how it could have been made less bad. It turns out that the Australian version is, in many ways, a significant improvement over the original.  The original is a train wreck.  That being said, it contained some interesting nuggets, and provided for some interesting contrasts, which I've detailed below. 1.  In my last review, I complained that Christine was "so passive, it's insulting," but remarkably, the Love Never Dies Australian production actually gives her more spine than she had in the original London production.  In the original production, when Christine first sees...
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Les Miserables: What Did I Choose for the Definitive Soundtrack?

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For my articles about Les Miserables , I discussed the various positives and negatives of the different albums, at least five if you don't count the original French concept album and the movie soundtrack.  One reader asked me what album tracks I used to create my idea of the definitive Les Miz soundtrack.  I'll go through each track below, with an explanation as to why I chose it over the others.  Note that I created my "Ultra" version before the movie soundtrack was released, but I'll give some thoughts as to which of the movie tracks would be best suited for an "Ultra" version. Overture/Work Song: Broadway Cast.  I use this album for a lot of the early Valjean tracks because I feel as though Wilkinson is in the best of voice here, though I suppose London would work as well.  While John Own Jones sounds great on the Les Miserables Live! album, I consider Wilkinson to be the definitive Valjean. On Parole/The Bishop: Tenth Anniversary Cast.  This is...
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