Wednesday, November 29, 2017

Telling yourself, ADWD

This post comes out of a new series of writing I do on ASOIAF meta and other topics of popular culture over at the Patreon of the Boiled Leather Audio Hour. If you like to read stuff like this, chime in just 1$ and you get access to everything I write. If you throw in 2$, you even get access to mini-podcasts I'm doing with Sean T. Collins answering questions by listeners of the podcast. Give the Patreon a look!

As PoorQuentyn noted, characters in "A Song of Ice and Fire" are often  marked by Martin to be wrong when they're "telling themselves" things.  So I decided to make a search through the text and record all instances  where they're doing this to see if the theory holds up, continuing with  "A Storm of Swords".  

Wednesday, November 22, 2017

Sam, Skagos and the Feastdance

This post comes out of a new series of writing I do on ASOIAF meta and other topics of popular culture over at the Patreon of the Boiled Leather Audio Hour. If you like to read stuff like this, chime in just 1$ and you get access to everything I write. If you throw in 2$, you even get access to mini-podcasts I'm doing with Sean T. Collins answering questions by listeners of the podcast. Give the Patreon a look!
 
Rereading "A Feast for Crows", I came upon an interesting tidbid: when the ship with Sam, Gilly and Aemon passes Skagos, there's a lof of world-building going on:  

Friday, November 3, 2017

Stranger Things Season 2 Review

This post contains spoilers for season 1 and 2 of "Stranger Things". Duh.

Quick! What was the best thing about "Stranger Things"? Did you answer "The conspiracy plot about a shady government agency covering up a generic experiment"? No? Nobody else did, either. So it bears the question: who the fuck thought it was a good idea to expand the plot in that direction? Like this baffling one, season 2 of "Stranger Things" is a cascade of bad decisions from the first to the last episode, executed with all the competence only a multi-million dollar budget can buy, carried by the goodwill a genuinely compelling first season bought you.

Wednesday, November 1, 2017

A Gardener's Coin

This post comes out of a new series of writing I do on ASOIAF meta and other topics of popular culture over at the Patreon of the Boiled Leather Audio Hour. If you like to read stuff like this, chime in just 1$ and you get access to everything I write. If you throw in 2$, you even get access to mini-podcasts I'm doing with Sean T. Collins answering questions by listeners of the podcast. Give the Patreon a look!

Rereading "A Feast for Crows" currently, I was struck by the detail of the golden coin that Qyburn turns up in "Rugen's" cell. That coin, dating back to the Gardener kings and subsequently turning out to be used by the Queen of Thorns to cheat on local merchants, was just a detail in the great political plot until it got me wondering this reread around.