I'm Telling You This Because I Want To Talk

Have you ever noticed that thing where when there is a group of people and a portion of the group is listening to one person while others are listening to another then all the attention shifts away from one of the speakers the audience-less speaker will just kind of stall while looking around for anyone to continue telling the story to, even if the new audience has no overlap with the old one. And there's that awkward bit of eye contact language as the story teller tries to drag people in and audience members try to avoid glances or get sucked in.

I find the whole eye contact communication fairly funny. But what I find especially amazing is how little it matters who gets sucked in to hear the rest of the story. If someone starts talking you can give the person the benefit of the doubt that she/he thinks there is information the audience would appreciate knowing (or would find amusing or...). Then when the audience is lost if the person only started again upon regaining the attention of the original audience it would be one thing. But as far as I can tell it rarely matters who gets sucked in by the eye contact game. Which I think eliminates pretty much any possibility other than the story teller is talking purely for his/her own sake. Not that this is such a terrible thing - telling others a story can be very therapeutic. But the instances of this scenario really make it seem like a huge portion of communication must be more for the sake of the speaker than listener. Yeah I know I'm far from the first person to come to this conclusion. And yes as I started writing this post I did realize the irony of writing about people who talk for their own sake without caring who is listening on my blog.

Dollhouse

Semi-spoiler alert.

So my understanding was that Whedon had a 5 season plan for dollhouse. They made it 1.5 seasons in before Fox decided to cancel the show. That left 9 hours of dollhouse. I really think they are covering the whole 5 year plan which means each episode is about 0.4 seasons and it does feel like each episode is covering a half season story arc. As the guy in the attic said - that's ahead of all projected schedules. I'm getting extra mad at fox because the last few episodes haven't been as enjoyable since the plot is so rushed, but they do seem like they would be awesome multi-episode plots. But with the speed they are going through the story I'm barely caught up with the idea that Echo has gone from slave to super hero. At least we got to see Victor being Topher.

The Eye of the World

Lending someone a book you think they'll like seems like it would be nice, except it is a bit less clear when it is first book in the third longest novel series (in latin or cyrillic characters). Wow, just looked up #1 on the list - that is a giant ball of silliness.

There is a definite sense in the book of struggling against an overwhelming enemy who can be set back but never really defeated. I think Robert Jordan helps bring this out by giving the reader an overwhelming number of pages to read. No matter how much I read in a day it barely dented the book, and finishing the book is barely denting the series.

I actually really liked The Eye of the World and appreciate Julie lending it to me. This book is very lord of the rings, although based on the ending I expect it to start diverging in the next book. And I think the actual writing style is somewhat different (well the most obvious is there aren't many songs and poems in this one).

One of my few criticisms of LOTR is that Tolkien made Gandalf so powerful that he then had to handicap him by giving him orders to not intervene too much. I still think Gandalf is awesome, but I do think that in The Eye of the World the power of the characters is a bit more balanced so no one is artificially holding back (well, later books might correct that). Although I am left wondering if those three characters are so important why is there only one Aes Sedai with them? What are the others up to that's so important? I imagine this will be answered later so if you know the answers to these questions don't tell me.