Correction: NASA is hiring a *new* planetary protection officer. The position has been around for years, but is getting reorganized. (I've actually met Cassie Conley, the previous PPO: she was great, maybe a little too diligent about her job, but can ya blame her?)

A lot of those stories are just the pipe dream of an ambitious real estate developer who knows a guy who works for the NY Times.

Rule 1 of Game of Thrones: sea travel is instantaneous, land voyages take months, yet everyone insists on walking through the goddamn riverlands anyway.

I mean, I agree about her sense of humor, but you heard her litany tonight. After being treated like a pawn her whole life, sold into slavery, raped, tortured, almost assassinated several times, been made barren and lost her child, and had her husband murdered, your take on it is "girl, you just need to learn to…

You've got a really good point, but the Iron Bank is not the same as the city of Braavos. I mean, Israel was founded as a Jewish homeland, but you can still buy a pork sausage pizza there.

I don't think "inept" is right. Even in the books she had a fair amount of tactical cunning, it's just that her fixation on revenge led her to use it in stupid ways.

Totally agree. Another way in which that plotline was full of cheap contrivances: Jon insisting on going to Dragonstone himself. There's an obvious better choice for an emissary: send Sansa. Sansa is high-ranking enough that she's not an insult to Daenerys, but since she's not the King, she can't bend the knee,…

I'm take climate change very seriously, it's my job, but that's a really stupid metaphor.

Nah, she's just in transit, it's a fvck of a long way from the Riverlands to Winterfell.

Definitely. When she teamed up with Euron in the first season, I said, "this is like the chicken flirting with the fox to convince him to guard the henhouse."

(Psst! Ixnay on the essurrectedray!)

Yeah, this bothers me. The battles based on book material always have a *reason* for the outcome: the winner had a clever tactic, the loser made a critical blunder, etc. But in a lot of the post-book battles — especially the ones involving Euron — the winner wins just because the plot requires him to establish…

Zeno's Trilogy.

The books have this problem too. Sea voyages take microseconds, land journeys take years, but everybody insists on walking through the damn Riverlands for some reason.

It was hinted last episode that in addition to being horribly painful and having a dangerous risk of spreading the disease, the treatment doesn't work most of the time.

It wasn't even necessarily Cersei's idea: people always tend to follow the style of the rich and famous. The problem was that the outfit looked like someone higher up than just a servant, confusing the audience (or at least me) into thinking she was important.

Me just now: "Oh, wow! So long as Bioware's next game isn't called Mass Effect: something or Dragon Age: something, I'm psyched!"
[clicks on trailer]
"… okay maybe not."

Awesome! I'm super psyched for the five hundred hours of fully voiced existential philosophy debate.

If you like XCOM and Invisible, Inc., I recommend MASSIVE CHALICE if you haven't played it.

I started Subnautica on .. Tuesday, maybe? … and I'm in too deep: I've sunk about 20 hours of playtime and a new graphics card into it so far.