As Google has worked to overtake the internet, its search algorithm has not just gotten worse.  It has been designed to prioritize advertisers and popular pages often times excluding pages and content that better matches your search terms 

As a writer in need of information for my stories, I find this unacceptable.  As a proponent of availability of information so the populace can actually educate itself, it is unforgivable.

Below is a concise list of useful research sites compiled by Edward Clark over on Facebook. I was familiar with some, but not all of these.

⁂

Google is so powerful that it “hides” other search systems from us. We just don’t know the existence of most of them. Meanwhile, there are still a huge number of excellent searchers in the world who specialize in books, science, other smart information. Keep a list of sites you never heard of.

www.refseek.com - Academic Resource Search. More than a billion sources: encyclopedia, monographies, magazines.

www.worldcat.org - a search for the contents of 20 thousand worldwide libraries. Find out where lies the nearest rare book you need.

https://link.springer.com - access to more than 10 million scientific documents: books, articles, research protocols.

www.bioline.org.br is a library of scientific bioscience journals published in developing countries.

http://repec.org - volunteers from 102 countries have collected almost 4 million publications on economics and related science.

www.science.gov is an American state search engine on 2200+ scientific sites. More than 200 million articles are indexed.

www.pdfdrive.com is the largest website for free download of books in PDF format. Claiming over 225 million names.

Maglor’s Gap

Right now, holding up a sign in St. Petersburg condemning this war is the textbook definition of “neither safe nor careful.”

Anti-war protesters in Russia are the ones helping these actual soldiers realize their orders are wrong and put down their weapons. Inspiring this recognition of the monstrousness of their actions.

Protestors aren’t just doing the right thing, they’re making a huge difference in the viability of this war.

They’re crumbling Russian military morale. Their actions are directly intervening, in a way that we as westerners can only be grateful for.

The Third Age of the world is ended, and the new age is begun; and it is your task to order its beginning and to preserve what must be preserved.

Can you believe that S1E8 of The Wheel of Time came out more than three weeks ago? It seems like yesterday and forever ago, so I guess I am feeling The Longing.

Since I still cannot watch, or read, or listen to, or talk about anything that isn’t directly related to WoT, I guess I can spend a bit more time doing some math and sharing the results with you.

Disclaimers:

I am looking at screentime, which is just a number among others that can be used to talk about something (in our case, a TV show). It can provide some interesting information, but it should not be used, for example, to prove the irrefutable quality of a plotline. A minor character can have a significant screentime in a given episode for being in the background of major scenes (*cough* Leane Sharif in Ep6 *cough*). Similarly, a major character getting more screentime than another doesn’t enforce that they also have more development (and I will come back to that later on).

I computed those screentimes, and I am far from perfect. Mistakes and approximations can exist. While doing that Season 1 breakdown, I still found some minor mistakes on earlier episodes. Moreover, not everyone working on this would compute screentime the same way. While I aimed for consistency during my work, other people may come up with different numbers, and this would be perfectly fine.

If you have missed the breakdowns for the different episodes, links are below. I am also linking the speaking time breakdowns, made by @far-dareis-me.

WoT Screentime: e1 | e2 | e3 | e1-3 | e4 | e5 | e6 | e7 | e8

WoT Speaking Time: e1-3 | e4 | e5 | e6 | e7 | e8

Also, for a quick reminder, I will mostly be talking about two types of screentime:

Total screentime: it includes whenever a character is present in a scene (either physically or through voiceover), no matter its state of consciousness (so, conscious, asleep, unconscious, or even dead).

“In-scene” screentime: it includes whenever a character is physically present in a scene and conscious.

Now that the serious talk is done, please expand below for a bunch of (hopefully) fancy charts!

shorter or are our phone

screens getting longer

So back when we knew the adaptation was 100% happening and everyone was slightly concerned about it Rafe made a post about how they would be focusing the adaption on the story as a whole instead of a 1 season=1 book sort of deal. This confused many and most people seem to have taken it as having 2-3 books per season. Which, based on what we've seen, isn't right either. Because what they're doing is so much more interesting than that and is why the TV show is working.

When he said they were adapting it as the complete story that's what he meant. Everyone working on the show and in the writers room is a fan of the series. They have someone whose job is to track book canon and how it's effected by the TV show. They love this story and, more importantly, they understand it. They really seem to get a lot of the deeper themes of the books. They're looking at what the core of the story is and figuring out how to write that. While at the same time updating it for a modern audience.

(I'm of the opinion that RJ tried to be progressive, but was held back. Both by his own hangups (dude had trauma from Vietnam) and by the times. We went from no mention of queerness to oblique side notes of "pillow friends" to just saying that that guy likes guys not girls. The world has changed so much when it comes to accepting and celebrating queerness over the last 30 years I'm not even sure how to describe it. I think he'd be happy with the changes in this regard and apparently Harriet is okay with them, so.)

The show's writing room clearly went back to highschool English and sat down to figure out the key themes and character arcs. They also seem to have torn apart the storylines and figured out which pieces were essential to which characters and plots. This is a joyful reimagining of all of this. It's taking the pieces and rearranging them into a new picture.

Weaving a new tapestry with the same threads.

What they've created as a result is so much fun so far. Even scenes lifted almost wholesale from the books are given a new spin and some fresh thread. For the most part if you did a beat-for-beat/scene-for-scene recounting there is very little that is the same between books and show. But the heart and the essence of the characters and story is still there. Beating strongly.

You can sit and complain that various scenes are missing or that the show is just making shit up. But that misses the point. I never feel like what I'm watching isn't the Wheel of Time. The parts that have had me coming back to the story for 20 years are still there. Some are even getting a brighter spotlight shown on them. The story is the rereadable part, not the individual scenes. I can watch these characters and know that I'm seeing Rand and Nyneave and Moiraine. Egwene is the same Egg I've had a very tumultuous relationship with over the years. They may not be walking the exact same path, but they are the same characters.

Which is just so lovely. I was one of the people who was hesitant to belive it was even possible to adapt the series. I'm so glad Rafe and Co are proving me wrong. They've taken the core of the story, like any good AU writer, and found a new way to share it. They love the story as much as I do. It's pretty great.

Honestly this is an approach I hope more adaptations take in the future. Understand the story being told and adapt that to the medium rather then trying for the 1:1 transfer. Find what people love and what makes it tick and build from there.

(Also it's fun to have knowledge of the world and still not know exactly what's going to happen. I could lay out what I think each character's major plot points will be and how they'll happen, but I don't know. It's so much fun.)