Endgame Viable

This brief post serves two purposes.

First, it’s a test to see if my IFTTT workflow will successfully post a link to this post on Twitter and my super secret Discord server which isn’t really a secret but I just haven’t had any particular need to tell anyone about it.

Second, with the start of Blaugust I noticed a sudden burst of comments, which is great, except some of them were pretty clearly spam comments. At least, I interpreted them as spam, and removed them. (Weirdly I thought requiring a Google or Twitter login would eliminate almost all spam by default.)

It turned out that I had never set myself up as an administrator on my own site, so I had to jump through some hoops this morning, by which I mean edit some Linux config files in a terminal window, before I could actually administer the comments. Somehow I’d managed to run for almost a year without seeing a single comment that needed moderation.

I still need to write a full comment policy, but for the time being, if a comment is from someone I don’t recognize and it’s got a link to somewhere to buy stuff, I’m probably going to interpret that as spam and delete it and/or block the account. Especially if it’s on older posts. In my experience, valid comments typically only arrive on posts that are less than a few days old.

Also just another note that unlike WordPress, comments are pretty ephemeral on this site… I wouldn’t recommend writing something that you expect to live on the Internet forever. It’s more of a direct message than a publication platform, if you will.

256. Do cats or dogs make better pets? Why?

In the dream I saw a dog and a cat lounging on a porch. I asked them, “Do cats or dogs make better pets?”

The dog said, “Cats jump out of dark shadows and scare me. I don’t like them.”

The cat said, “Dogs are fun toys for me to play with.”

“Which is best?”

The dog said, “I comfort you in sorrow and help you see the joy in everyday life, but I cannot survive by myself.”

The cat said, “I entertain you with my antics and keep you from sleeping late, and in return I expect to be well paid in food.”

“Cat, you’re making a strong case for the dog.”

The cat scoffed. “Dogs are stressful to keep as pets. You never really know if a dog is happy, do you? Every day, there is a constant nagging worry in the back of your mind that you are not doing enough to nourish the life of that animal that depends on you so completely. Wouldn’t the dog be better off with someone else? Wouldn’t the dog thrive more if you took them to an animal shelter where someone else could adopt them to give them the happier life they deserve?”

The dog looked alarmed. “But I like it here with you. You’re my best friend.”

Image source: Bella and Gracie locked in battle for the mat on the porch.

This post is for Blaugust 2022 day 3. More posts.

“241. What do you think about keeping ‘wild’ animals as pets? If so, when?”

In the dream, I saw a butterfly perched on a railing, basking in the sun. I asked it, “What do you think about keeping wild animals as pets?”

The butterfly eyed me suspiciously. “Are you thinking of capturing me as a pet?”

“I have no net.”

“Lucky for me. I like to fly wherever I want, so I would make a poor companion.”

“I suppose that’s my answer.”

The butterfly laughed. “The important thing is what you think about it. You have two cats.”

“They aren’t wild animals per se. Then again, they were probably born in the woods. I’m convinced there’s a feral cat colony out there somewhere.”

“I see. Feral cats sound wild to me. They should be allowed to run wherever they want.”

“It’s their choice to live here. They stay because I give them food and shelter, and they’ve become domesticated. Still, they’re not pets, they’re roommates.”

The butterfly scowled. “It is just as well. Cats are dangerous. They catch and eat my brethren for sport. Better that you keep them locked up so I can fly where I want.”

A much easier prompt today, oddly worded though it was. Image source: A photo of a butterfly on my back porch, in the style of some multicolored pen scribbles I put on a piece of paper.

This post is for Blaugust 2022 day 2. More posts.

“168. Why is it hard for you to forgive yourself?”

In the dream, I saw a pair of deer in the woods. I asked them, “Why is it hard to forgive yourself?”

The first deer said, “That’s not an easy question to answer. Greater minds than us have pondered this for thousands of years.”

“But deer are at peace every time I see them, surely you must know.”

The second deer said, “We lead simple lives. We don’t concern ourselves with the foibles of humans.”

“So forgiveness is a weakness?”

The first deer said, “Not at all. Forgiveness is divine,” at the same time the second deer said, “Definitely. You must project strength to survive in these woods, no matter the cost.”

I pondered this. “I’ve done things I’m ashamed of. Shouldn’t I be held accountable?”

The first deer said, “Everyone makes mistakes. The wise person admits their mistakes and tries to do better next time, and pass that knowledge on to others.”

The second deer scoffed. “The cunning person never admits their mistakes. It’s the only way to stay ahead of the jackals.”

I shook my head. “But which is right?”

The deer startled at a noise. They gave no answer as they bounded away into the woods.

Well, that was a doozy of a random writing prompt to get on the first day, which made me immediately question my Blaugust strategy. Image source: One of hundreds of photos of deer that wander through my back yard year round.

This post is for Blaugust 2022 day 1. More posts.

My Blaugust is going to be an experiment.

I’ve created a step-by-step plan for each of my Blaugust days:

The idea all started with a need to create 31 header images for the posts so I didn’t have to do that during Blaugust. In previous years I picked random photos out of my collection, so I wanted to do something different: I turned to Deep Dream Generator, one of seemingly hundreds of AI art-generating web sites out there now which lets you upload pictures or even describe pictures with text and make them look cool so you never have to hire an actual artist anymore. Progress!

Ahem. Biting commentary on needless technology overreach aside, I’m sure I’ve said this before, but adding pictures to blog posts is my least-favorite part, and now happens to be the most labor-intensive because of my uniquely quirky blogging platform. I can’t just drag-and-drop images, I have to pre-upload them to a repository somewhere and insert the links into my blog text, just like the good old days. Not fun.

The point is, I made 31 template files each containing a unique Deep Dream Generator-generated image and all the required metadata for the 31 days of Blaugust and have them sitting on my drive waiting for me to fill in the text each day.

Pictures taken care of, all that’s left is writing some text each day. But what to write?

I said before I don’t really want to just write “something” every day. These days, I see the task of writing out whatever I’m thinking or feeling on any given day as more in the Twitter or micro-blogging domain than the long-form blogging domain. It’s just so much easier. Direct from brain to publication (within reasonable social norms). Boom, done, move on with your day.

That leaves specific, directed prompts. Hopefully within the boundaries of some kind of a central theme, so the whole 31-day project can be viewed as a whole, so I can look back on the event from the future and say, “Ah, 2022 was the year I did ___ in Blaugust.”

I previously had the idea of rolling some dice to find random question prompts from various web sites each day and write to that. But I was trying to find a way to incorporate the images I’d generated into the text somehow so they make some sense. Then it hit me: Dreams!

And that’s how I came up with this project idea, which I managed to commit into a blog post of some description with a picture just in time before Blaugust actually starts.

Good luck everyone!

This post is for Blaugust 2022 day . More posts.

Blaugust is back for another year. I don’t really need to explain it, just go do the thing.

For myself, I have no idea what to write. I definitely don’t want to write writing advice. Writing advice is always the same. Except now you have to use emojis to communicate effectively.

I don’t want to write about myself because that’s intrusive and gross. I don’t like to write about my favorite creatives because revealing your favorite things is basically the same as writing about yourself, and unnecessarily making yourself vulnerable to an Internet full of personal judgments.

In general, posting “something” every day doesn’t appeal to me very much, so I need some kind of meta-theme. I’m strongly tempted to find a “100 writing prompts” site and roll a d100 each day to pick what to write. Or perhaps use this ad-filled random question generator site I just found. Writing answers to questions is the easiest form of blogging.

I also think it would be fun to improvise a 31-part choose-your-own adventure with a reader survey at the end of each post to direct the narrative, but that’s a lot more work than I’m willing to put in. I only include it here in case someone else wants to steal that idea.

In any case, whatever I write needs to be really short because writing hurts my back. It’s always bugged me that blog posts have to be longer than tweets, but tweet-sized blog posts just don’t look right. They don’t look right on a web page, and they don’t look right in an RSS feed. It’s a problem I’ve never figured out how to solve.

Tonight I’m going to start “flipping the switch” to host the blog entirely in AWS.

You, constant blog reader, will not notice anything.

Unless something goes horribly wrong. In that case, everything will explode and I’ll need to figure out how to roll back the changes gracefully. You might not even get to see this post explaining what happened.

When it’s done, you might notice the site loads about a bazillion times faster, as it will no longer be served from an antiquated shared hosting platform. There will also be a different endgameviable.com certificate.

The site that you or your feed reader programs load will become a teeny tiny custom Golang program that runs on AWS Elastic Beanstalk. That program will decide if you (or, let’s be honest, Google) are trying to load a very old link that needs to be redirected. If so, it will redirect to the new, updated link. Otherwise it will make a reverse proxy call to load the blog content from a static Hugo-built site, hosted with AWS Amplify.

If you’re one of those people who runs 50,000 script and ad blockers, it’s possible they might mention something about this, but they shouldn’t.

So here goes nothing. The switch-flipping begins by transferring the endgameviable.com domain to AWS Route 53 control. It will probably take a couple of days to finish completely, based on the tests I did with transferring another domain name.

Around the start of every new year, there’s a collective burst of enthusiasm around humanity for trying new things. I, for example, am trying to devise a new reading strategy.

Naithin recently wrote about this topic of reading goals, which spurred me to revisit my habits. I know that my previous strategy has failed because I can’t remember the last new book I read or listened to*, though I’m sure I must have read something within the last couple of years.

The Blaugust Discord also had some talk recently about book recommendations, and there were a lot of book titles and authors thrown around that I’d never heard of.

I’ve become woefully bad at keeping up with the latest book trends. Every year the number of popular authors seems to multiply and I don’t know most of them anymore.

For example, I still think of Brandon Sanderson as a “new” author, but I think he’s put out more books now than Stephen King. We get it, Brandon, quantity is more important now to an author’s career than quality, sheesh! Don’t keep rubbing it in! (Staying quiet on Twitter is also pretty important now.)

Anyway, I thought I’d write down the names of all these books I’ve been seeing and try to figure out how a person such as myself, a modern person-on-the-go with relatively poor eyesight for reading, could possibly keep up with reading or listening to these hundreds or thousands or hundreds of thousands of new books that are published and/or “published” every year, when I have very little time I’m willing to dedicate to reading or listening to books.

It’s turned into a bit of a puzzle.

First of all, simply “writing down the names of the books” is a somewhat more arduous process than I expected. Finding software to automate or assist in this task in a way that fits my mental workflow is proving fairly difficult.

There are sites like Goodreads and StoryGraph and LibraryThing but they aren’t quite right for my simplistic needs. Those sites are targeted more for people who are really into book culture. They graph and correlate and recommend and social network and statistic and like and share and subscribe and … I just want a list of books I can search and add to with a few mouse clicks, preferably without having to show the whole world.

For now, I’ve settled on … a text file.

But since I’m a developer at heart, I had to turn it into a structured YAML file so I could use it as a data source for Hugo to make a blog page (I sampled a bunch of books this week already). But still, it’s just a text file right now. Two of them, actually.

I’ve broken the new process down into three phases, which basically involves maintaining three lists, and the moving of books from one to the next.

The first step in the process is to “sample” a book from the big list of book recommendations (I call this list my “recommendation inbox”). This is the main part that I want to get better and faster at.

The thing I need to do better is make time to actually read the samples. It’s a bit of a chore, to be honest, like homework, because I know I’m probably not going to be that interested in at least 75% of them. I’m going to have to set aside time every week or month to power through them, essentially doing the work of an editor’s assistant going through a slush pile, which is normally a paid position, but here we are.

Once a sample is completed, I’ll move the book to the second list, which I’m giving the catchy title of “sample results.” I’ll write down a few sentences summarizing what I read, then give it a stamp of “interested” or “not interested.” If I’m interested, then, when it comes time to find a book to read, I’ll know to go out and buy that one (or, if I’m honest, more likely the audiobook).

That’s where things get dicey though, because it’s really time-consuming to read or listen to books, and there’s only a finite amount of hours in each of my days I can dedicate to hobbies. I have to divide that time between gaming, and blogging, and reading, and listening, and watching a movie or television, and whatever else I happen to want to do, which is unfortunately a list of interests that is often too large to handle effectively without strict scheduling, something I don’t particularly enjoy doing and rarely stick to.

But going through and codifying samples will at least put me one tiny step closer to the goal of reading more stuff. Or, at the very least, being aware of more stuff.

After I finish a book, assuming I find things I’m interested in, then it gets moved to the third list, which is the “I’m done with it forever” list.

You might imagine this would imply that I’d be finished reading the book, but that’s only if the book is really engaging, because I’m not going to hang around with a book if I’ve lost interest in it. These days, there’s at least a 50% chance I’ll give up on a book before I even reach the middle, based on past history.

The third list would note those findings, and why I gave up. If I actually finish the book, a more ambitious person might write a review, but I’m not a book blogger and I don’t write reviews. I only write down what I think sometimes. (Actually I have written down thoughts for most of the books I’ve read since 2010, at least up through 2018, when I suddenly stopped.)

So that’s the plan.

Image: Those are some of the last physical books I bought in this lifetime, probably prior to 2010 (the only ones in the house that aren’t in a box somewhere). A Memory of Light might have been the last physical book I bought.

* The last (complete) audiobook I listened to was Master of Formalities by Scott Meyer, back in October 2021, which was amusing. Before that, it was Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir in September 2021, which was good (especially in audiobook format), with caveats. Before that it was The Outsider by Stephen King, back in 2020, which was also good in the standard Stephen King way (which means I enjoyed it at the time but I don’t remember a thing about it now), and also because Will Patton is an amazing reader. That doesn’t count audiobooks I listened to for 5 or 10 minutes before giving up on them. I should add those to my lists.

The first post of the year is about … sigh … NFTs.

I have no interest in NFTs* or the outrage surrounding them, but I feel like I need to write a post about NFTs anyway. Everyone else is talking about it**, and it’s a rare blog topic I haven’t written about. But I’m approaching it like a homework assignment.

It all started barely a month ago with the Ubisoft Quartz trailer. Has it only been a month? It seems like we’ve been talking about NFTs in gaming for years, but that trailer is indeed dated December 7th.

Come to think of it, NFTs were a hot topic all last year, but it was mainly in the context of the art world.

But now, as we begin 2022, Square Enix’s president launched another firebombing campaign on this Dresden of discussions by declaring they want to make blockchain-based “play to earn” games.

That’s what really pushed me over the edge into investing effort into a blog post.

Ugh I'm going to have to write a blog post about NFTs aren't I

That, and … well, it might be hyperbole to say that the gaming community is getting hysterical about this, but that’s how it looks to me.

Personally, I’m against hysteria. I’m planting my flag on the side of non-hysteria.

My general feeling on NFTs, as of this moment, goes something like this: a) I don’t really care, because I won’t be buying any NFTs (except maybe for educational purposes), b) I don’t really care if other people waste their money on NFTs, c) I know one artist who wants the money that NFTs might bring to their career in the gaming industry, so I hope it works out for them, and d) I can’t discern how NFTs might significantly change the existing direction of gaming in any way. NFTs strike me as the next logical evolution of a factory entertainment industry that has been becoming bigger and more corporate and more dependent on revenue for decades.

Just to be clear, I don’t want NFTs in my games. I recommend everyone avoid NFTs, the same way I would recommend avoiding risky behavior like, you know, hitting yourself in the eyeball with a hammer.

I should also mention that I don’t want cosmetic cash shops in my games. I don’t want to log in and see a gigantic splash screen of extra skins and emotes I should buy with gems and bits and bobs, while the “play game” button remains a teeny tiny afterthought down in a hidden corner. But that ship sailed a long time ago.

I’m not an expert in NFTs, but based on what I’ve read so far, when you put it in terms of its impact on gameplay functionality, I don’t see much difference between the introduction of NFTs and the introduction of cash shops, so I’m struggling to understand why everyone around me is suddenly alarmed about something that I perceived to have happened a long time ago.

Maybe the thinking is that we didn’t push back enough against cash shops, so now we really need to push back against NFTs? I guess that makes sense, but it seems overly optimistic.

One of the reasons I don’t particularly want to get involved in this NFT discussion is that it’s evolving so rapidly that I can barely keep up with what anyone is talking about anymore.

We were talking about NFTs and Ubisoft Quartz. But now, thanks to Square Enix, we’re suddenly debating the relative merits of “Play to Earn,” which doesn’t even have a Wikipedia entry yet.

It’s supposed to be the same discussion, but on the surface, those two subjects don’t sound remotely related (to me). One, I think, is about collecting collectibles, the other is about selling player-created content. But they’re both tangentially related to “blockchains,” the foundational technology around which all of this crypto and NFT hubbub revolves.

I take this rapid conversational movement as a sign that the discussion has already devolved to the point of conflating disparate topics together into one mass glob of emotional outrage with the trigger word “NFT” attached to it. It’s already become too much work for me to try to separate it all out into individual topics to analyze.

More importantly, it’s become too much work to try to convince anyone else that it’s more complicated than just “yes to NFTs” or “no to NFTs.” As of now I view “NFTs” as a very big topic composed of a lot of smaller sub-topics that I may or may not have differing opinions about. Same as pretty much every other societal issue in the entire world.

I had thought to go on into a deeper discussion of my research into the pros and cons of NFTs and blockchains in a neutral and informative manner, but it’s been several days now and I kind of don’t care anymore. Everybody’s just going to fight about it and yell past each other anyway, so why bother? :)

My basic point at the end of it all is something like: NFTs aren’t great, but I’m not yet convinced it deserves the level of righteous fury on display lately. Just … don’t buy them. But if you do buy them, congratulations, you’re probably more affluent than the majority of the planet. You should be proud.

* Normally I would write something like “NFT (Non-Fungible Token)” but the words “non-fungible token” don’t add any additional meaning to the letters “NFT.”

** I couldn’t find another link for “it.”

Image: Sugar cane fields in El Salvador. It might have made more sense if I hadn’t deleted some two thousand words from this, the fourth major revision of the post.

The final episode of the first season ends with a bang.

Rand and Morraine traverse The Blight to reach The Eye of the World while Lan tries to follow. Rand fights/talks to The Dark One, while the army of Fal Dara fights off a Trolloc invasion. Nynaeve and Egwene nearly burn themselves up channeling in the battle. Padan Fain re-appears and steals a Horn, and Perrin … just kind of stands around watching.

A good episode to end the season, if not great. I think the show peaked in episode four.

I really enjoyed the scenes with the brother and sister rulers in Fal Dara and all they did to try to save their city and people. I don’t remember their names. It was Lord Agelmar Jagad and Lady Amalisa Jagad.

I mentioned last time they hadn’t done a very good job of setting the stakes for this last episode, but the scenes with Lord Agelmar and Lady Amalisa, and the sacrifices they were willing to make to defend their city, served that purpose fairly well. I would have liked to see more of that leading up to this episode.

Rand’s “battle” with The Dark One was fairly anti-climactic. The Dark One doesn’t seem that bad to me. He seems perfectly reasonable. He just wants what’s best for Rand. Why all the fuss? :)

Loiel dead?!? Gasp!

Morraine can’t channel?!? Gasp!

To wrap up my thoughts on the entire first season, I still wouldn’t call it anything more than “good enough,” but it was entertaining to me personally. But I imagine that’s mainly because I read all the books and I could fill in all the blanks. I have a hard time imagining someone who didn’t read the books would enjoy it as much.

The show suffered a bit–as almost all streaming shows suffer from now–from a lack of continuity and cohesiveness from episode to episode. Presumably in order to shove these shows out the door as fast and cheap as possible, they tend to rotate directors and writers every episode or two, and they all have different ideas of what to focus on.

So we end up with an entire episode on Aes Sedai politics, which was good as a stand-alone episode, but it didn’t exactly fit with the season as a whole, which was supposed to be about which of the Two Rivers Kids was The Dragon Reborn. And we get a whole episode dealing with the bond between an Aes Sedai and her Warder, which was a good episode, but it seemed like it might have fit better in a season 2 or 3 or 4. And we get a cool prologue of an Aiel fight sequence, which was very cool, but again, it only barely related to the overall season arc.

It was like nobody was in charge of making sure the episodes fit together, and all the different writers and directors were left to their own devices.

Hopefully, if the show becomes a hit, they can tighten all that up going forward.

For me, probably the scene with Lord Agelmar and Lady Amalisa in that room with the armor. I’m not sure what it says about the series when the best scenes so far have been the ones that didn’t involve the regular characters or storyline.

I thought the channelers blasting the heck out of those Trollocs was pretty cool. That’s the kind of magic I like to see in fantasy: The kind that levels armies. The wild magic of an uncontrolled nuclear reaction.

I liked most all of the scenes surrounding the battle of Fal Dara, though they suffered a bit from lack of budget or time or something in the area of Trolloc-rendering. I liked those parts a lot better than Rand dealing with The Dark One, which seemed a bit anticlimactic.

Loiel: “I’m standing…” In response to Perrin asking, “How can we just sit here while everyone else is fighting?”

Morraine. Largely a passive observer in this particular episode, unfortunately. Somehow she looks different in each episode to me. Maybe it’s because they keep changing her hair style from show to show. Perhaps that’s the only way they can show the “ageless” look of Aes Sedai. Overall in the first season, she’s definitely been the standout character in the show, the anchor that’s holding everything together.

Lan. Lan spent the whole episode sidelined in The Blight, not being a factor, for a change. Overall I liked his character a lot in the first season, something I wasn’t expecting. He’s also an anchor of the series, and they need to keep putting him in as many scenes as they can.

Rand. Well, he’s come a long way since that first episode as a character. He’s almost tolerable now. Almost. This is the point in the books, though, when he really became obstinately insufferable, so it’ll be interesting to see how it goes in the series. The whole “tell them I’m dead, I’m going on a sabbatical” thing doesn’t bode well.

Mat. MIA. Don’t miss him, to be honest. His character hasn’t developed much. Perhaps that’s why the actor left.

Perrin. Still not doing much. They haven’t explored Perrin’s character much yet so it’s hard to have much of an opinion on where they’re going with him. He had the “inciting incident(s)” in his character arc and … that’s it so far. Otherwise he stands in the corner brooding.

Egwene. Like Perrin, I don’t know what to make of her character yet, because they haven’t explored it much. Each character gets so little screen time because of the sprawling nature of the material that it’s hard to get to know any of them, and they seem content to leave them languishing. I can’t think of any significant ways that Egwene has changed over the course of the series so far. I’m not even sure she’s had an “inciting incident” for her character yet.

Nynaeve. So she died and then … got better? I didn’t understand what happened there at the end. Did Egwene heal her? It looked like hand-waving plot magic to me. Anyway, Nynaeve definitely got most of the character development in the first season. She’s the only Two Rivers Kid so far that’s made a real impact on the show.

Thom Merrilin. MIA. I’m starting to think he isn’t coming back in this first season. He’s probably destined for “occasional guest star” status.

Loiel the Ogier. KIA. Didn’t see that coming. I didn’t like him much anyway, but now I might miss him if he’s gone. :) But I fully expect them to hand-wave him back to life in the next season if he was a popular character. They seem to be demonstrating a willingness to use plot magic whenever necessary (something that was meticulously avoided in the books, I might add).

Padan Fain. Chief exposition deliverer in this episode, while Perrin just stood there sheepishly listening. Are they setting him up as a long-term villain?

They’ve alluded to the “past is the future” a few times in the series so far. We saw skyscrapers covered with vines. And now we’ve seen a futuristic city with flying cars from “3000 years ago.” I vaguely remember that from the books, but it was only barely mentioned here and there. (Somewhat like the Shannara books.)

I’ve finished the audiobook of The Eye of the World, so I have the full scoop on everything now.

I didn’t remember Rand and Morraine going to The Eye of The World alone at all, and in fact, they didn’t. Most everything that happened there at the end in the show was different in the book. Extremely different. The mysterious and mostly unexplained Green Man was there, along with a couple of Forsaken, and a big pool of saidin. Morraine battled it out with a Forsaken (largely off-screen). The Dark One wasn’t there. Lan got his butt kicked and Nynaeve did as well. Rand channeled and teleported to The Gap and defeated the Trolloc invasion by himself.

The scene with Rand and Egwene and the baby on the homestead seemed familiar to me somehow, but it wasn’t in the first book. Rand only ever talked to The Dark One in some dreams. (So many things in the show seem familiar, I think, because the books are so long and comprehensive that literally anything and everything happened in them at one time or another.)

I thought that a significant part of the last episode’s events back in Fal Dara actually occurred in the second book. Padan Fain and The Horn of Valere, for example, and that big battle. (The Horn of Valere, incidentally, was discovered at The Eye of The World–it was the main thing they brought back.) (Padan Fain, also incidentally, was a gibbering wreck of a Gollum character at the end of the first book, nothing at all like we saw in the show.)

At least, I didn’t remember any battles at the end of the first book. But there were a ton of battles like that in the books, and it’s impossible to remember them all. It turns out there was a battle in The Gap at the end of the first book, but it was a background, offscreen, offhandedly-mentioned event, until Rand teleported into the middle of it and blew up all the Trollocs with the One Power.

Lord Agelmar was in the first book, but mostly as a background character, trying to convince Morraine to stay in Fal Dara and help fight Trollocs. I don’t think Lady Amalisa was mentioned at all in the first book (0 search results). Certainly not leading channelers in any battles. They must have heavily embellished that or lifted it from somewhere else in the series. (But I liked that they did. Otherwise the last episode would have been somewhat dull.)

Were they saying Morraine had been stilled by The Dark One there at the end?? That certainly didn’t happen in the first book. At least not that I remember. She fought a long painful battle with one of the Forsaken at The Eye of the World, but they left the impression she was fine afterward. Or she left that impression.

Then again, she’s a very mysterious character who hides a lot, so it’s entirely possible she didn’t channel any further after the first book and I just didn’t notice. (I honestly don’t remember Morraine having much of a central presence after the first book.) Or perhaps in the series, they’re planning to have her follow what was Siaun Sanche’s journey in the books, which would actually be quite a bit better for the longevity of her character.

And it looked like they were strongly implying there that Rand blasting The Dark One is what broke the seal on his prison and let him out. He definitely smirked before he disappeared. I don’t remember if that was the way of things in the books or not. I don’t think so, because Rand did all his channeling elsewhere, against Trollocs, not against The Dark One.

Was that even The Dark One in the show? Maybe it was one of the Forsaken? I don’t remember The Dark One being, you know, corporeal.

The end of the first book was quite confusing, to be honest. I remember thinking that the first time I read it, and it was no less confusing the second time in audiobook form.

Anyway, it looked like Min had gotten onto a caravan heading out of Fal Dara. It reminded me of the caravan that went into the Aiel Wastes in the fifth book. I think it was Min that went on that journey? I feel like Padan Fain might have been on that caravan too? Or a Forsaken in disguised perhaps? And Morraine and maybe Mat? I don’t remember. Like I’ve said before, everything in the books runs together and I have little sense of a distinct timeline in my memory.

That was the Seanchan rolling up on the Western shore there at the end, one of the many interesting but ultimately unrelated storylines that tended to derail the books for quite some lengthy amounts of time. I don’t remember them arriving in the second book, but I might be wrong. Who can remember? I do remember some fairly iffy cultural subjects around those people that I’ll be interested to see how they handle in the television show.

Thom Merrilin never came back, much to my surprise. It turns out he didn’t return in the first book either. But Morraine did mention once in The Ways that she thought he was still alive.

I started the second audiobook, which, for the record, begins with a prologue of “Bors” at a meeting of Darkfriends. Then Rand sneaks out of Fal Dara just as the Amyrlin Seat, Siuan Sanche, arrives (I will never be able to spell “Amyrlin” or “Siuan” correctly on the first try, ever). No Seachchan so far.