Monday 16 May 2011

Possible blog downtime

My PC's been experiencing some 'machine check exception' errors recently, a rather nasty form of error which suggests something is screwed up in the power supply, motherboard or memory. My attempts to work out what the issue is haven't been too successful so far (ironically I just experienced an outage and reset halfway through writing this post) and the issues seem to be getting worse. Unfortunately I can't afford to replace the PC or get it serviced, so if the computer stops working altogether I'm pretty much screwed. If this happens my computer time will be limited to when I can borrow time on a friend's machine, which may only be for short bursts at the weekend. Particularly frustrating as I have several reviews backed up at the moment, as well as a new series of blogs on the possibilities of a Wheel of Time TV series.

Hopefully I can get this issue sorted, but if there are no more updates for a few days, that's the explanation :-)

10 comments:

Anonymous said...

A WOT tv series? im not sure.

remember that one time when someone brought up the possibilties of a WOT anime? dont know about you but that sounds a whole lot more plausible to me.

Adam Whitehead said...

Robert Jordan vetoed a WoT anime in the early 2000s. Apparently a Japanese company sent him a proposal but only wanted to do the first 3 books and turn the ending of THE DRAGON REBORN into the ending of the series, so he said no.

Red Eagle and Universal, who are currently developing a movie (implausible, I know), have said they're not interesting in pursuing animation, only a live-action project.

Anonymous said...

A WoT TV series? How would that ever work? Never mind the sheer length of the series that would be needed to tell the story, how would they do the battles? Most of them are huge in scale.

Adam Whitehead said...

Big battles are pretty rare in the series. Dumai's Wells at the end of Book 6 (in my conception, around the end of Season 3) would be the first big one where main characters are right in the thick of it. The Battle of Carhien in FIRES OF HEAVEN can be done remotely (Mat getting into skirmishes, Rand directing distant CGI troops and launching One Power barrages from his wooden tower). The ones in KNIFE OF DREAMS might take a bit more doing, but nothing too strenuous.

In fact, none of the battles in WoT so far have equalled the Battle of the Blackwater in GAME OF THRONES (though the Last Battle in A MEMORY OF LIGHT could outstrip them). Seeing if they can do that well in Season 2 may be key to seeing if a WoT TV series could be practical.

Jebus said...

I've got a spare PC you can have... only I'm in Oz :)

There is so much filler in WoT that they could easily compress the series, even a truckload more than GoT is doing. Also, based on that show, something of that scale would actually be possible. Also it has a larger pre-built audience who, I suspect, would be more amenable to a TV series than the many GRRuMblers out there.

Either way, they should skip it and do First Law instead, you've got to be realistic about these things.

Anonymous said...

There's too much going on in the first few books to do six books in three seasons to me. A large portion of the show could be done in just a couple seasons for the mid to later books. I hope you're able to post those blogs soon as I'm very interested in reading your take on it.

Anonymous said...

Are you talking 10-13 episode seasons or 24-26 episode seasons?

Anonymous said...

I don’t really see how any TV series could afford having such a huge amount of "magic" use in a show. Most of the Rand vs. a forsaken fights would probably eat up huge amounts of money.

It would be great if they managed to do a faithful adaption, but I don’t see how it can be done. Maybe in 20 years when good cgi work could be a lot cheaper

Unknown said...

I'd be up for a Wheel of Time TV series, for sure - particularly from a cable network. Though aside from a little leftover guilt that I don't at all enjoy them when so many others seem to, the books can go to hell.

Anyway. Sorry to hear about your computer woes, Adam - you're right in that a machine check exception sounds terribly nasty. Would that I could be of more help to you but at least it sounds as if you're on the right track, thinking the mobo or your power supply.

God, but we're all getting our downtime on this week, aren't we? ;)

Adam Whitehead said...

Touch wood, but I gave my PC a thorough clean-out and dusting last night and found that the cable connecting my hard drive to the mobo was very lose and in fact half-hanging out. I replaced it with a spare and no problems since then (probably speaking way too soon).