Don’t read if you don’t want huge spoilers.

The plots turned out exactly as I predicted. There were only a couple of things I didn’t see coming.

With any luck, Tarly will get lost and forgotten in his huge library, but I doubt it. With even more luck, the pointless and boring Bran will follow Tommen’s example and fall from some high place (maybe someone will help him get to the top of a tall tree). I did not foresee Tommen’s exit, but it looked like something thrown in at the last minute and he certainly won’t be missed.

Jon Snow refuses to die, of course. I can’t believe he’s King in the North after his idiotic management of the battle against Ramsay Bolton. That battle was won by Sansa, who has turned out to be quite the Machiavel and may wind up winning what Tyrion calls “the great game.” I suspect she now has the ruthless wit to get rid of Baelish, which she needs to do as soon as possible. Sansa, I admit, has crept up on me. I didn’t expect her to be a player of any importance.

Quite predictably, Dany got her army and a bonus navy. She has a habit of losing kingdoms, so I’ll be surprised if she hangs on to her power.

Also predictably, Cersei gave the High Sparrow a satisfying send-off and roundly kicked the ass out of everybody else while she was at it. Her remaining enemies will have to get up early in the morning to beat her. Meanwhile, the Iron Throne finally has a suitable monarch (and her coronation armor is one of the best costume designs I’ve ever seen — pretty good picture here).

So now the board has been reset with new factions about to contend in another big war. I have little hope that Jon Snow will get stabbed and buried irrevocably or that one of the worthy people will get all the toys. The worthy people, in my view, include Dany, Sansa, and Cersei. Sansa will probably succumb to some moronic error of Jon Snow. Dany will try to do something unrealistic and get driven into exile again. Cersei has the best chance, but I’m sure she’ll be beaten by some deus-ex-machina idiocy involving Jon Snow, Bran, and the army of the dead (which totally won’t be stolen from Lord of the Rings).

The show will probably end with Tarly on the uberest throne of all.

In case you were worried, Legendary, Blizzard, Universal, et al. have already doubled their money, which I’m sure cheers them up in the face of less than stellar reviews.

I can kind of understand the negative direction of these notices. Critics seem almost willing to overlook the fact that this is a video game movie as long as it involves them in a focused plot and three-dimensional characters. Unfortunately, Warcraft is not On the Waterfront or Lawrence of Arabia. It’s a fantasy epic about silly fantasy races and equally silly magic because, you know, the source material is a video game. You can hanker for Lord of the Rings and Game of Thrones all you want (and these come up often as the standards for comparison), but what you get is something different.

What you get is a film treatment of the lore on which Warcraft is built. Notice I didn’t say World of Warcraft. This is intended to be a serious adaptation of Warcraft origins — where did characters like Durotan, Gul’dan, Medivh, Lothar, etc. come from? How were the orcs changed by Fell magic? And so on. The “world” of World of Warcraft is definitely there, but people expecting to see a cinematic recasting of the “World of” world should stay at home. They should also stay at home if they expect the IV-drip character development of Game of Thrones or Peter Jackson’s ludicrous video-gameization of Lord of the Rings, because this movie is intended to be as faithful to the Warcraft RTS as possible, as though Blizzard and the film companies got together and asked, “What would happen if we could slow down something like Warcraft III, go down to the ground, and get to know some of these little pixelated figures?”

So that’s what it is. The figures are expanded to “life-size” and given interesting motives, disappointments, crises, and other dramatic movie stuff. Azeroth is very impressive, and this is the movie’s nod to World of Warcraft. Territories look immense and real. Places like Stormwind, Iron Forge, Black Rock, etc. look exactly like you think they will. There’s a little too much gryphon flight, but whatever — it’s a pretty good gryphon or whatever you call that pet. Most interesting of all is the obvious influence of Blizzard artists on production design: practically every detail — down to the look of armor, swords, and shields — is reproduced faithfully from items you would see in the games. It truly is like being on the ground in a Blizzard title.

As for plotting and character development: I didn’t see anything wrong in either of these departments. The plot was appropriately epic and very easy to follow. The characters are as well-realized as they can possibly be. I just don’t understand all the bashing. I guess if anything goes wrong, it’s that the movie is too faithful to its source material and wants to pull the audience into it wholesale rather than portioning it out in more digestible slices. But this, to me, is really a positive, even if it turned out to be an error in judgment. It tells me that Blizzard takes its IPs very, very seriously will not let movie companies change them. This, ultimately, is the best thing about Warcraft. It’s a movie first and foremost for serious Warcraft fans — those wackadoos on the forums who can trace the lineage of the Proudfoots and the Hellscreams and tell you all about other things in the world that you don’t really care about. If you sit there for a few minutes, you’ll figure this out and the movie suddenly becomes quite good.

Enjoyed and would see again. 8.5/10 blood shards.

Realizing that Microsoft would never leave me alone, I decided to drink the Kool-Aid (which should be spelled Cool-Ade, but it’s not).

I don’t exactly hate it, but I’m not crazy about it. It’s all very borderless, smart-phoney, and white, except for the grays and blacks. As I imagined, the big emphasis is on tracking and monetizing users. I didn’t expect this to be so unapologetic and in-your-face. It’s everywhere, but it seems to apply more to Windows “apps” than to anything else, especially those you buy in the Store. Since I don’t use any yet, I just turned off whatever system things bothered me, which were surprisingly few in number. Number one irritation was the peer update thing, so I dumped that fast. I think Microsoft can afford the bandwidth to force updates on me.

I miss little things, like the old-school calculator, better defined scrollbars, and some other “3D” things that made earlier Windows interfaces easier to use. I haven’t bothered with Cortana and have no plans to use Skype. I don’t mind Edge, but until I get used to it, I made IE the default browser. (Where is the Home button in Edge?)

I installed Win 10 Home on two machines — my school one and the gaming computer. Since I had 8.1 on the school one, I just did an upgrade and all went well (at least I think so). The gaming one had Win 7, so I decided to do a clean install. The Media Tool made this pretty easy. Restoration of backed up Steam games and Diablo 3 went smoothly. Diablo 3 wouldn’t start at first, but after seeing the word “protocol” in log errors, I knew I had to get proper Nvidia drivers instead of the basic ones Microsoft installed. All was jake after that. Oh, the sound didn’t work either, but Realtek drivers did the trick. All this was on the gaming machine. The school one worked right out of the “box,” probably because Microsoft didn’t mess with the drivers already in place. Even though I’m impressed by a nice clean Device Manager after both installs, I pity the average Joe Walmart trying to get his laptop to work with no clue about driver software.

In sum, the whole thing went pretty well, and while I don’t see any big advantages to Win 10, I guess it could be worse. At least this is Microsoft’s focus now, so I feel like a second-class citizen instead of a third-class one.