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tavore · 2 years

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Tom Glynn-Carney, who plays Rhaenyra's step-brother and rival to the crown of Westeros, confirms things will be quite "strenuous."

"I'm looking forward to having Aegon have a lot more meat to get his teeth stuck into and to cause more havoc, really, and to throw a spanner in the works, which he does so well," he told the gathered audience.

Glynn-Carney also said he hopes audiences aren't too quick to judge Aegon as a character, though he admits it's already not looking good for him.

"He was always gonna be a tricky one because, on paper, he can very easily come across as an out-and-out villain, and someone who's dark and cold. I think he is all those things, but I think there's way more layers to him, as well," he said of his character. "He's not an out-and-out psychopath. There are complexities and intricacies within him that make him an absolute gift to play. He keeps me guessing, so hopefully that translates to keep everyone else on their toes."

"No one should really be able to make up their mind about him straight away," he added, "and hopefully they'll give him a little bit of a chance. But we'll see. It's not looking good!"

[...] "I'd love to hear more about his journey through it all because I know that playing Joffrey is no easy feat," the actor told EW in advance of the panel. "The backlash that came with it and the — I don't know if you could call it negative or unwanted or alternative attention he was given for his betrayal — I just think it's important for people to remember to differentiate between actor and character."

For what it's worth, Gleeson would later tell an audience on stage at the Con that he hasn't had any negative experiences with fans. But Glynn-Carney's point holds true: As Aegon in House of the Dragon — the player who raped a serving girl off camera, fathered numerous bastards, and stole his half-sister's throne — the star has been getting a lot of comparisons to Joffrey.

"There's been a couple of comments thrown about on social media, but I don't pay attention to them," Glynn-Carney said. "It's a compliment to me, if anything, that I'm doing my job, and it's having the impact that is required."

Besides, Glynn-Carney's performance is different from that of the mad kid king of Game of Thrones. Whereas you quickly get a sense of what Joffrey will do — given that choice, he'll always reach for the crossbow to impale a beloved character to a wall — Glynn-Carney is working to make Aegon unpredictable.

"In one of the first meetings I had with Miguel and Ryan," he said of season 1 showrunners Miguel Sapochnik and Ryan Condal, "we spoke about Aegon and his unpredictability. I was saying that I really wanted to have him teeing on the edge the entire time. The coin could flip onto any side, and we should never know which way it's gonna go. People will make their own decisions, but I just want to keep that kind of center of gravity."

But Glynn-Carney does find some commonalities between Joffrey and Aegon. "They're unlikable," he said. "They're tortured and have deep, deep issues, which is a lot of fun to play as an actor, but I also see [Aegon] as being incredibly complex. He's not an out-and-out psychopath. I'm not saying Joffrey is, but I see a multilayered character that just has endless potential of pits of vulnerability and empathy and things that we don't see that I think it's important to have at least a flavor of, because it brings the humanity to him, and that's what pulls people in two separate directions."

During his own panel at the convention last Friday, Glynn-Carney revealed that season 2 will start filming in March 2023 and that he's already preparing for the job. "I didn't really get a great run at things [in season 1]," he tells EW. "It felt very quick. I was in a few scenes. Season 2 will be a lot more meaty, so I'm looking forward to the challenge."

Glynn-Carney added that he's personally looking forward to exploring "the constant battle" within Aegon "between vulnerability and his darkness."

"I think one breeds the other," he said. "I think it's his vulnerability that breeds the darkness. It's the way he copes, it's his security, it's his safety blanket, it's an addictive coping mechanism for him to shut things out and to be cold. I wanna push that further, and I want to see where we can take him."

Tom Glynn-Carney eager for Aegon to 'cause more havoc' in House of the Dragon season 2 House of the Dragon star wants Aegon to be unpredictable: 'Season 2 will be a lot more meaty'

#hotd #hotd cast #aegon ii targaryen #house of the dragon #tom glynn carney #interviews

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alahmnat · 2 years

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WWDC 2022

General thoughts

To a large degree, this year was definitely more of an "evolutionary, not revolutionary" event. Lots of great polish put on stuff that was introduced last year, and some really great enhancements to the iPad in particular as a platform unto itself, but nothing that quite felt fundamentally groundbreaking.

Craig Federighi's schtick as Apple's "goofy uncle" somehow keeps working, and I think it's solely thanks to his decade-long commitment to the bit that started with his Hair Force One Game Center nickname. It also somehow still amuses me that the "crack marketing team goes on months-long drug-fueled bender to name the next macOS update" gag continues to make its way into the presentation every year.

The video also gave me the distinct and particularly unsubtle impression that Apple really wants people to get back into its giant donut office.

Anyway, deeper thoughts under the fold.

iOS/iPadOS

It's really starting to feel like these platforms are reaching a greater stage of maturity. There wasn't anything this year that was particularly groundbreaking or revolutionary for the iPhone, but there were a ton of places where things have been refined or fleshed out much more completely.

Lock Screen

The Lock Screen enhancements are honestly fantastic. Being able to set separate screens for different focuses is something I've honestly wanted to do since iOS 15 launched, because it seemed like such an obvious concept. Congratulations to all you weirdos who can now keep your anime tiddy wallpapers safely hidden while you're at the office!

In all seriousness, though, multiple typefaces, the foreground subject stand-out, photo shuffle, widgets, and bespoke Apple-designed lock screens + wallpapers are all super swish. Further minimizing the importance of notifications and giving you space to reclaim the wallpaper you put so much thought and time into choosing is also really nice, and I may just be saying that as someone who gets annoyed any time I see notifications piled all over Zami's sweet face.

Focus

The other Focus enhancements are also all extremely welcome. Giving 3rd party apps more control over how they interface with focuses is great, and hopefully this makes it easier to set up quiet hours from work in not just Mail, but Outlook and other apps as well. I do kind of wish you could set defaults for what things are allowed to do when you're not in a particular Focus, which can then be overridden. That way I could, say, have Outlook only provide notifications while I'm at work, without having to figure out how to silence them the rest of the week.

iCloud Shared Photo Library

This is a really neat idea that I can definitely see using for road trips and family visits where Oscy and I both turn into something of a shutterbug. I'm curious how well the "everyone has identical permissions" idea will fly out in the open, though. Do contributors/participants get to save local copies of the photos to their own library, or are they locked in the cloud? Given the focus that Apple put on abusive relationships later in the keynote, I can honestly see opportunities for abuse in either direction. If you can't keep local copies of things, how much easier will it be to gaslight someone about past events? On the other hand, if you can keep local copies, how do you maintain control over things you've added that you no longer want someone else to have access to (like intimate pictures; I know you just shouldn't do that, but we have to build for the users we have, not the perfect users that security professionals invent).

I'm assuming that if you remove it that you posted, it gets deleted from everyone else's device, but not yours. If you didn't post it, or otherwise retain a copy of your own (by, say, screenshotting it), it's gone as soon as anyone (original owner or not) removes it from the shared library. Guess we'll find out.

Privacy and Account Management

Apple really did two things with this release centered around account control: Safety Check and enhanced Parental Controls. Safety Check is a 100% slam-dunk no notes great addition to the platform. Even for people who aren't in abusive relationships, it's great to have a central place to manage and revoke access to your information from both people and applications. Having a one-button action for immediately and comprehensively cutting someone out of your account will undoubtedly be a godsend to anyone struggling to get out of such a situation.

Parental Controls are something I'm increasingly of two minds about. On the one hand, the internet is a legitimately dangerous place if you don't know what to look out for, and most kids just don't. Plus, it is a good idea to be able to institute some degree of impulse control on kids so they don't get lost in the magic rectangle all day, while still letting them have access to it for the important things they're carrying it for (though there's certainly also a degree of "how young is too young for someone to have their own mobile computing device?", whether it's a phone or a tablet; could this smartphone have been an email a RAZR?).

On the other hand, it's also extremely easy for parental controls to become another tool in the arsenal of an abusive or controlling parent. For queer kids in particular, it can be dangerous to give unsupportive or outright abusive parents such granular dominion over their child's own personal life, which is increasingly tied to the magic rectangle. Overall I think Apple does a good job of staying out of this end of the pool. However, given the propensity of both governments and private companies to treat queerness itself as an "adult" topic, I still get squeamish about the ability to "limit adult websites" as a general concept. Especially since Apple is prudish at the best of times.

All of that having been said, the additions to iOS and iPadOS 16 are centered around ease of use, and the things they streamline are good things to have streamlined, like letting you use a single slider to set the age-appropriateness of the various media and store libraries based on your kid's age, with the option to adjust each one manually as well. Also, putting the approval process for requests that come in over Messages in Messages is sort of a no-brainer that I was surprised wasn't already the way it worked.

Looking at the full features list post-keynote, app-specific clipboard access permission is one of those things you wouldn't have thought needed to be a problem in need of addressing, but here we are I guess *sigh*. I do like that the Hidden and Recently Deleted folders in your photo library are now authentication-locked by default, though. That's a nice privacy win.

On the security side of the privacy fence, Apple making it easier to roll out security fixes without having to do a while point release of the OS is also a great win.

Rapid-fire takes

The Shared with You API is cool, but I so rarely use the feature right now because it doesn't integrate with Telegram or Discord, where 99% of the stuff shared with me lives. I wonder if that's something this will enable, on top of letting apps feature content shared via Apple's own channels.

The collaboration API is also cool, but it also seems to rely on everyone being all-in on the Apple ecosystem at home and/or at work, so I don't know how much use it'll actually get outside of Apple Park.

Mail also seems to finally be getting a catch-up release, with attachment reminders, better search, queued send, snooze, etc. I like that they've added a follow-up reminder, for those of us who have the problem of things ceasing to exist the moment we stop thinking about them for 2 seconds.

The Passkeys spec is fascinating to me. I honestly hope it works, but I can also see it being something that could make distributed account access info for teams (like the stuff one would put in a shared 1Password vault) more complicated.

Messages (specifically, iMessage) is getting a lot of catch-up features to match competitors like WeChat, WhatsApp, and Telegram. I don't really use Messages because most of the people I know don't have an iPhone, but I'm glad those who do can now edit their messages after the inevitable embarrassing autocorrect mishap.

I still can't make an arctic fox Memoji. When are you gonna start taking the furry market seriously, Apple?!

Freeform looks neat, but again I'm not sure how widely used it'll end up being.

Being able to make Quick Notes on iOS is nice.

Copying text out of a video frame is incredible.

Templates for Reminders is a really cool idea. Being able to build a standard "packing list" checklist you can just create a new copy of is really handy.

Multi-stop routing is a welcome addition. Hopefully it supports adding a stop mid-route, so I can search for a gas station nearby without losing where I'm currently driving to.

Apple just casually throwing out a "we're coming for you, PayPal Credit" in the middle of an otherwise dull segment on Wallet updates is kind of hilarious. No fees or interest is a genuinely amazing set of conditions (of course because you're not borrowing money, you're just spreading your own out across 6 weeks, which is itself an exercise in encouraging more responsible spending).

Weather on iPad! Weather on iPad! Weather on iPad! Weather on iPad! Weather on iPad! Weather on

macOS (and iPadOS as a desktop)

On top of all of the features iPadOS is getting that it shares with iOS, it's also picking up its fair share of features that are shared with the Mac. It's clear that Apple is trying to grow the iPad and foster it as a more fully-featured car to the Mac's truck niche; you're still going to need a Mac to do a lot of higher-end stuff, like complex video editing, audio mixing, game development, or full-on application programming. But people who drive cars could also use more than the bare minimum. And so, the iPad seems to be growing up into "the desktop for the rest of us", so to speak.

Stage Manager

This is the big one, which was shown off first on the Mac, where it seemed... interesting, if a little out of place. Seeing it pop up on the iPad made immediate sense, though. On the iPad, this is a powerful alternative for app spaces, which can be clumsy to navigate by touch, or require a keyboard with buttons I don't have on mine. Being able to swap quickly and easily between small collections of windows is something I've needed fairly regularly, and while app spaces work, they're not really great for the task. There's still too much hidden information about where I'll be swapping when I swipe back, or how things will be laid out when I double-click the Home button (because I have a 4th-gen mini). Depending on how reliably I swipe between spaces at any given time without fumbling, I could have to swipe many more times to get back to something just 2 spaces away, because the OS will "helpfully" re-buffer the original space as the "next" space to swipe left into if I take too long to get off of the intervening space.

By contrast, Stage Manager would give me access to 5 sets of windows (1 active and 4 inactive), which is arguably more than most people will need at any given time. To use my most recent use case as an example, I was bouncing between two Safari windows, Shortcuts, Logger, and Creative Book Builder to copy a bunch of chapters of a fic into an eBook I could read without having to deal with the website's tiny, tiny font size. (I was using Shortcuts to transform the BBCode markup of the story's raw text into Markdown, which I then copied to the clipboard for pasting into Creative Book Builder, but thanks to a bug in Shortcuts in iOS 15, the clipboard was never populating so I had to log the contents of the clipboard to Logger, where I could copy it and then paste into CBB. And the second Safari window was for looking up other stuff that I needed as I was building the parsing shortcut.)

As it was, I had Logger in a slide-over panel, so in practice I was really only bouncing between two screens for the most part, but it was still an awkward experience given how frequently I had to do it (once per chapter, and it's a long fic). Being able to bounce between those screens with a single tap would have been so much nicer. Out of all the features they talked about for the iPad this coming year, this is probably the one I'm most excited about.

So why is this also on the Mac, when macOS already has plenty of windowing controls like Mission Control and Spaces?

I think it's there as a clever stepping stone for people coming from the iPad. Once folks are familiar with Stage Manager on the iPad for their multitasking needs, they'll be able to transfer that skill set to the Mac, making it easier to get onboard. Later they can graduate to Mission Control or Spaces or some combination of the three (Stage Manager integrates with Spaces, and Mission Control isn't going anywhere), but out of the box I think it's there to give people a broader, shallower ramp to transfer from the iPad to the Mac.

I can see it having its uses for people who have already been on the Mac forever, too. For those who are more mouse-oriented, or those who can't keep a large mental model of "off-camera" screens in their heads, it's a nicer way to switch between discrete collections of windows while maintaining context. I can even see using it for, say, game dev, where I could have Unity in one stage, Visual Studio in another, Substance Designer in a third, and Pixelmator in a fourth, with the ability to switch between them quickly and smoothly.

Continuity Camera

This is just neat. It's kind of hilarious that they're rolling this out after essentially building an iPhone into the Studio Display as a webcam earlier this year, but whatever. More people having better webcams is a plus.

The Desk View mode is a really clever way to take advantage of the wide-angle lens on the iPhone to do something unique. I can already see it being really useful for Twitch streamers who focus on arts and crafts (paging Tinker Tailor Solder Fry, or Cameron's Warhammer painting streams). The fact that it supports dual-streaming of your face and your desk simultaneously is especially cool.

Dictation & Accessibility

Apple's really leaning into voice and image processing this year, with huge upgrades to dictation, Live Text basically everywhere in the system, and live auto-captioning galore. This could easily have gone in any of the sections, but I'll throw it here to help out the anemic-looking Mac section ;).

Dictation gaining support for automatic punctuation is honestly huge. No more having to say "period" at the end of a sentence. Nice for messaging, but this also seems like an absolute must-have for drafting longer blocks of text without having to mode-switch between speaking and micro-managing Siri every few words.

Other Stuff and Rapid-fire Takes

Quick Look in Spotlight, I never thought I'd see the day. Bless.

I'm definitely looking forward to the up-tick in copyrighted image misuse in Keynote slides following the addition of image results from the web into Spotlight.

Not sure how I feel about the iOS-ification of System Preferences Settings

Apple is Sherlocking the ambient noise app ecosystem.

This is specifically a call-out for the copy on their features page: props to Apple for including "care provider" as well as "friend" in the list of people you can benefit from cooperating with by using 2 controllers for a single input.

Home continues to mostly be a thing for people who aren't me, for 2 reasons: 1) I am that meme about developers not trusting the toaster with an electrical connection, and 2) even if I weren't, I live in an apartment so my options for "smart" things are, essentially, LED lights and maybe a needless security camera that's likely to get stolen. And I've already got all the voice-activated lights I need. That said, props to Apple for putting their HomeKit platform out there as a new standard, since god knows nobody else in the industry is gonna make anyone making these things care about security.

Duplicate detection in Photos is great for folks who haven't bought Gemini.

GOD BLESS AMERICA, they're updating the Photos picker for the first time since, like, 2008. The current one is just so terrible.

Nobody wants background video playing in the Apple TV+ tab, Apple. Nobody. Literally zero people.

Safari

I'm breaking this out into its own section because Safari is like a mini-platform that lives inside of the rest of Apple's ecosystem. After last year's... contentious release process, this year's Safari updates are almost banal. That said, there's some good stuff in there, especially in what they didn't cover in the keynote.

Tab Groups are continuing to mature. While I know a lot of people poo-pooed them last year, even as a power user, I've found them extremely helpful in keeping concerns separated in ways that "just use another window" fails to accomplish, especially when I'm not on my Mac. Seeing that Tab Groups are getting per-group start screens is nice, but the real action is in the per-group pinned tabs, which is something I've desperately wanted since I started using the new Safari last year.

Integrating Tab Groups into the collaboration API is also really cool, though I suspect it won't get a whole lot of use in the real world given Safari's ongoing abysmal market share rankings on non-mobile devices. I'm curious whether they're persistent, or if they only last while a collaboration session is active. I like the idea of turning the whole browser into a sort of meta-Google-Doc, while still keeping access to your own tabs outside the scope of what people can see (and judge you for).

I really do hope they've done something about tab retention stability, though. More than once lately, my iPhone has just forgotten that it had tabs open that were outside of a tab group, and my Mac has also done it once recently. Fortunately, I was able to mitigate the loss on the Mac by pulling up the tabs on another device before iCloud Sync caught on that they were gone. I wasn't as fortunate about the ones on my phone, though. I've since taken to just putting my "general" tab set in a group named after the device itself, since tab groups seem to be more stable than the "not in a group" group.

It also may be an artifact of the number of tabs I have open in various groups at any given time, but my iPhone has consistently been having a problem where I tap a link, it loads the page, and then immediately loads the previous page, and wipes out the tab's entire back history in the process. It does it when I just hit "Back" sometimes too, in which case it'll reload the page I was backing out of and nuke the tab's history so I can't get back to where I was trying to go anymore. My Mac has recently started having this problem very intermittently too, and I'm starting to get both worried and annoyed by it.

Rapid-fire Takes

Praise the lord for website and extension settings sync.

I'll be curious to see what new standards for the web and browser extensions the Webkit team has compiled for this year.

Nice to see Apple continuing to push password requirement transparency, whether through their own input attribute proposal or just doing it the hard way and making a big list.

Web Push Notifications, for when you really just never want to be left alone again in your entire life. Yay. (Honestly, I get the utility, but the practical use cases are far, far narrower than proponents think. Just give me an RSS reader, I don't need to get pinged every time TechCrunch posts a new article.)

Hardware

I don't really have much to say about the new M2 chips beyond "holy shit", so I'll probably leave things there for the chipsets. Absolutely absurd performance boosts over a chipset that was already an absurd performance boost over the i7 and i9.

The new Air looks great, with the return of MagSafe (seriously, why would you ever walk away from the one thing that makes your power cords so great?) and the ability to get back to The Thinness without sacrificing performance. The MBP is finally™ back in a good place, so I'm perfectly fine with letting the Air return to its roots as a minimally-connected ultra-lightweight portable with enormous battery life. I do wish that they'd lean into the color spectrum they assembled for the iMac, but also these are probably still targeted at the business market (at least internally), so we get the boring colors instead. At least there's more than 2 this time. (I am going to grumble at Apple for the somewhat misleading unqualified "Air starts at $999" line when that's for last year's model.)

The 13" MacBook Pro is a weird little gremlin of a machine, though. After the removal of the Touch Bar from the bigger MacBook Pros last year, I figured the one on the 13" had a stay of execution because it was already in the pipeline before they decided to make "full-height function row" a selling point. (Honestly I'm glad there wasn't a live crowd last year so I wouldn't have to listen to the condescending whooping that would have inevitably followed that line from the stage.)

But now it's a year later. Apple's sticking a new M2 in the thing. And it still. has. a Touch Bar. They even make a point of pitching it on the website!

Apple, you're giving me incredibly mixed signals here. Please, I beg of you, if you're going to kill the Touch Bar just do it and be done with it. This will-they-won't-they thing is gonna kill me instead. At this point in time, just from a financial standpoint, I'm probably committed to waiting for the 16" M2 MBP to come out next year before getting a new laptop (assuming I don't opt for a Studio instead), but I'm not sure I'd want to get an M1 now anyway if there's the possibility they'll bring it back as an option next year in the bigger ones. If they go 2 years without it on the 16", it's not a fluke and it's definitely dead, but the fact that it's still there on the 13" model gives me a weird amount of hope.

#apple #wwdc #wwdc 2022

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