Supreme Court of Westeros, ruling 101

Thursday is court day! 

Welcome to the Supreme Court of Westeros! Every week, three pressing questions from the community will be answered by the esteemed judges Stefan (from your very own Nerdstream Era) and Amin (from A Podcast of Ice and Fire). The rules are simple: we take three questions, and one of us writes a measured analysis. The other one writes a shorter opinion, either concurring or dissenting. The catch is that every week a third judge from the fandom will join us and also write a dissenting or concurring opinion. So if you think you're up to the task - write us an email to stefan_sasse@gmx.de, leave a comment in the post, ask in the APOIAF-forum or contact Amin at his tumblr. Discussion is by no means limited to the court itself, though - feel free to discuss our rulings in the commentary section and ask your own questions through the channels above.

One word on spoilers: we assume that you read all the books, including the Hedge Knight short stories, and watched the current TV episodes. We don't include the spoiler chapters from various sources in the discussion, with the notable exception of Theon I, which was supposed to be in "A Dance with Dragons" anyway.

Casting Call: If you want to be a judge, please email us!

And now, up to ruling 101! Our guest judge this week is is Johnny from Philadelphia. He began reading the series after the 1st season of Game of Thrones and began listening to BLAH and APOIAF shortly thereafter. He is on the forums at APOIAF as The Smiling Knight. This is his third time as a member of the Supreme Court of Westeros.

Supreme Court of Westeros, ruling 100

And it is there! For 100 rulings, Amin and I have delivered verdicts on questions from the fandom, aided by alternating guest judges. To mark out 100th anniversary, we have looked way back to our humble beginnings, when this little endevour was still "Stefan's Theory Hour" and I invited Amin, Steven Attewell and Sean T. Collins to maek its 50th anniversary with a podcast about the topic. So, we're doing that again - Sean T. Collins, Amin and I dissect questions that have been collected exclusively for the 100th ruling, and we do so in a massive podcast. You find it here. 

Correction: Contrary to what was stated in the episode, Steven Attewell was not part of the last anniversary. Sorry for the mixup.

Boiled Leather Audio Hour #42

Fire and Blood: The Third Reich

We’re traveling from Westeros to Nazi Germany in this unusual—and, to us, urgent—episode of the Boiled Leather Audio Hour. Why are we venturing so far afield from our usual topics of discussion and debate? Because we’ve always believed that A Song of Ice and Fire, like life itself, is best viewed through an unsparing ethical and historical lens. Lately, however, that lens has been clouded. In recent weeks, numerous right-wing politicians—most notably Republican presidential candidate Ben Carson and his supporters in the United States—have distorted and repurposed the rise of Adolf Hitler and the roots of the Holocaust to suit their preexisting positions. Astonishingly, in the day since this podcast was recorded, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu followed suit. We believe this to be an act of tremendous disrespect for the dead, one that also does a grave disservice to the living. Given our personal and professional interests in this pivotal epoch in history, which have shaped our interaction with ASoIaF in ways large and small, we decided to explore the era’s real lessons as best we could.

What role did privately held weaponry and paramilitary organizations actually play both in the Nazi Party’s ascent to power and the resistance against it? How should we view Europe’s failure to act in the face of Hitler’s belligerence, and Germany’s failure to capitulate in the face of certain defeat? What parallels can be drawn between the forces that fueled the war Hitler ignited and those at play in Westeros and Essos? What makes World War II different enough from other conflicts for the likes of Vietnam-era conscientious objector George R.R. Martin to say it was worth fighting? Is there such a thing as a “good war” at all? In this experiment of an episode, we try to answer those questions.

Two notes before we proceed:

1) We are deeply indebted to the work of the historians Ian Kershaw and Richard J. Evans, particularly Kershaw’s two-volume Hitler biography and Evans’s Third Reich trilogy. 

2) On a much lighter note, this episode (hopefully—with iTunes, god only knows) marks the debut of our brand new logo, created by Sean’s partner, Julia Gfrörer. We are in her debt.

Download Episode 42

Additional links:

Mirror.

The work of Ian Kershaw.

The work of Richard J. Evans.

All Leather Must Be Boiled’s Ian Kershaw tag.

Dan Carlin’s Hardcore History series on the Eastern Front.

Previous episodes.

Podcast RSS feed.

iTunes page.

Sean’s blog.

Stefan’s blog.

A Flight of Links

- Favorite ASOIAF chapters
- Damphair's rebellion
- Lovely passage
- Who will die in TWOW
- Sansa meta
- What really killed the dinosaurs?  
- The White Walkers aren't good
- Pulp Fiction in Breaking Bad 
- The collaborative brillance of The Martian 
- Tarantino likes his own movies 
- Steam machine review of sorts
- Euron's wizard eye
- Wyman Manderly's imminent death
- Arya XI

Supreme Court of Westeros, ruling 99

Thursday is court day! 

Welcome to the Supreme Court of Westeros! Every week, three pressing questions from the community will be answered by the esteemed judges Stefan (from your very own Nerdstream Era) and Amin (from A Podcast of Ice and Fire). The rules are simple: we take three questions, and one of us writes a measured analysis. The other one writes a shorter opinion, either concurring or dissenting. The catch is that every week a third judge from the fandom will join us and also write a dissenting or concurring opinion. So if you think you're up to the task - write us an email to stefan_sasse@gmx.de, leave a comment in the post, ask in the APOIAF-forum or contact Amin at his tumblr. Discussion is by no means limited to the court itself, though - feel free to discuss our rulings in the commentary section and ask your own questions through the channels above.

One word on spoilers: we assume that you read all the books, including the Hedge Knight short stories, and watched the current TV episodes. We don't include the spoiler chapters from various sources in the discussion, with the notable exception of Theon I, which was supposed to be in "A Dance with Dragons" anyway.

Casting Call: If you want to be a judge, please email us!

And now, up to ruling 98! Our guest judge this week is Talha Naushad, a professional researcher working in the middle east. When he is not working, he is dabbling his wits in contemporary history and politics and immersing himself in all things concerning A Song of Ice and Fire. He is a member of the community at JonSnow123 at Tower of the Hand and usually lurks around various forums, blogs & podcasts engrossing himself in the theories and analysis of the ASOIAF material and show.

A Flight of Links

- Alan Sepinwall about Fear the Walking Dead season 1
- And Sean T. Collins
- In what can only become a major artistic debacle, German trash-channel RTL wants to produce a ten-hour-miniseries about Hitler's life, "showing the fascist dictator form a radical new angle". Oh. My. God. (German article)
- Trailer for the Good Dinosaur
- Ant Man 2 announced
- How Jon and Dany connect
- Summerhall
- Westeros development plan
- Bran VI
- Catelyn VI 
-A look back at System Shock
- FarCry Primal sounds interesting
- This looks good
- In case you didn't know
- Hail Caesar trailer 
- DAMN IT MAKES SENSE

Supreme Court of Westeros, ruling 98

Thursday is court day! 

Welcome to the Supreme Court of Westeros! Every week, three pressing questions from the community will be answered by the esteemed judges Stefan (from your very own Nerdstream Era) and Amin (from A Podcast of Ice and Fire). The rules are simple: we take three questions, and one of us writes a measured analysis. The other one writes a shorter opinion, either concurring or dissenting. The catch is that every week a third judge from the fandom will join us and also write a dissenting or concurring opinion. So if you think you're up to the task - write us an email to stefan_sasse@gmx.de, leave a comment in the post, ask in the APOIAF-forum or contact Amin at his tumblr. Discussion is by no means limited to the court itself, though - feel free to discuss our rulings in the commentary section and ask your own questions through the channels above.

One word on spoilers: we assume that you read all the books, including the Hedge Knight short stories, and watched the current TV episodes. We don't include the spoiler chapters from various sources in the discussion, with the notable exception of Theon I, which was supposed to be in "A Dance with Dragons" anyway.

Casting Call: If you want to be a judge, please email us!

And now, up to ruling 98! Our guest judge this week is Rick Davids, a student of Linguistics in a German city that doesn't exist (like an uncool R'hlyeh). In his spare time he writes, reads and procrastinates. He has been a fan of ASOIAF since the early 2000's and blames GRRM for ruining his appetite for fantasy with his unmatched masterpiece.

A Flight of Links

- Sean T. Collins rips into yet another episode of Fear the Walking Dead
- Yathzee reviews Until Dawn
- The Martian reviw
- Nintento is the bad guy here
- Why do games need to restart when you change graphic settings? 
- Mad Max is generic
- Pacific Rim II indefinitely on hold
- Gears of War got a superflous HD remake
- An annotated history of boss fight battles
- Why you shouldn't root for Littlefinger
- Favorite/least favorite POV
- Good catch about Tyrion
- Really good stuff about Feastdance
- Meta about the battle at the Green Fork
- Damon Lindelof about the pressures of producing television
- Daeron II analysis

Supreme Court of Westeros 100th ruling coming up!

The Supreme Court of Westeros will be going into its 100th ruling only three weeks hence, so we'd very much like to do something special. A fan request that we got often was to do a special podcast, like we did back when The Nerdstream Era celebrated the 50th issue of Stefan's Theory Hour, the precursor to the Supreme Court. And, well, that's what we're going to do. 

So, if you have any question that you want to have answered in that podcast by an esteemed panel of judges, please shoot away. You can even give in questions that we already did, because the atmosphere and the panel will be different. We will then choose totally arbitrarily from all of these questions. So, fire away!

Supreme Court of Westeros, ruling 97

Thursday is court day! 

Welcome to the Supreme Court of Westeros! Every week, three pressing questions from the community will be answered by the esteemed judges Stefan (from your very own Nerdstream Era) and Amin (from A Podcast of Ice and Fire). The rules are simple: we take three questions, and one of us writes a measured analysis. The other one writes a shorter opinion, either concurring or dissenting. The catch is that every week a third judge from the fandom will join us and also write a dissenting or concurring opinion. So if you think you're up to the task - write us an email to stefan_sasse@gmx.de, leave a comment in the post, ask in the APOIAF-forum or contact Amin at his tumblr. Discussion is by no means limited to the court itself, though - feel free to discuss our rulings in the commentary section and ask your own questions through the channels above.

One word on spoilers: we assume that you read all the books, including the Hedge Knight short stories, and watched the current TV episodes. We don't include the spoiler chapters from various sources in the discussion, with the notable exception of Theon I, which was supposed to be in "A Dance with Dragons" anyway.

Casting Call: If you want to be a judge, please email us!

And now, up to ruling 97! Our guest judge this week is Logan Luce, an ecological consultant and nerd. He blogs about ASoIaF, among other things, on tumblr.