Yeah, I was scrolling to see if anybody said this explicitly, but … not only did Tolkien not know about plate tectonics, the geography as it exists is explicitly not supposed to be the result of natural processes anyway. There was an intentional desire for symmetry that Melkor fucked up.

It's magic. Martin has explicitly said it's not some unrevealed astrological quirk.

that was the best part of the book to me, too. I was all in for T'Rain and Sokolov, and hated everything involving Abdallah Jones (and unfortunately as a result, everything involving the novel's ostensible main protagonist), who was just infuriating to me from his second scene on, and not in the way that's fun and…

Look, there are two real answers:

Actually, although it's not stated anywhere in LOTR, Middle Earth is supposed to be Earth.

Given how important film and television are to our popular culture, it's really fascinating how many people seem basically unable to grapple with the central concept of "acting".

Yeah, I love Murray as a performer, but I second-hand know someone who met him at a private event and … after she said she was a fan, he was warm and gracious and then invited her to kiss him on the cheek; being over a foot taller, naturally he didn't bend down to accommodate, and then asked her to do it again on the…

They filmed a rape scene by accident!

Real talk: I own a Trump branded tie (given to someone in my family as a gift, who then re-gifted it to me, several years ago; I don't wear it anymore) and it's far from the nicest tie I've been gifted or bought for myself but it doesn't glisten like wax paper under a hot lamp either, so I don't know what's going on…

As I've said since the middle of the campaign, it's really fucking galling to have to look at the opinion of the highest level of elitist moneyed people of Manhattan and say "yeah, they're right, he's got no class, in any sense of the word." I don't want to have to agree with those people on a point of snobbery. I'm…

Yes, because the Lannisters' incomes are probably a few times more than the Starks', but not like forty times, and I'm also following "you actually need to control the funds to count" rules - i.e., Julia Louis-Dreyfus isn't a billionaire YET, because her father is still alive (though obviously she's a millionaire many…

Not that they don't have their own televisual shames, but I like that the British are in on the whole "let's take our thing and make it dumber and cruder so we can achieve great success in America" strategy. (All time champ: Chinese food.)

This comment will only make sense to '90s kids!

If I squint I can see some pretty obvious truisms associated with their work but the whole thing just smacks to me of trying to reify shit that doesn't need to be, and won't submit well to it. There's no sense in which my life experiences have more in common with someone born the year I graduated high school than they…

(1) Generalizations about age cohorts this big are always dumb. My father (b. 1955) had radically different cultural experiences than someone born 10 years earlier, but both counted as "the baby boom".

Last week I bought a used copy of Monster for 50 cents!

Yes; outside prologues, we only see the "smallfolk" through the eyes of noble-borns in difficult circumstances, or through Davos, the commoner-made-good. (Part of why I think the "revolutionary" aspects of Martin's writing are oversold, which isn't his fault to begin with.)

Agreed. I didn't love the movie, but I thought the performances were mostly very good … though for me what makes it is Laura Linney at the end.

I've specifically said to people that if you saw my grandparents weeping at my mother's funeral, you wouldn't think Penn was overacting. It's a marvelous argument-winner, but it's also true! And of course Penn was discovering his teenage daughter's body, not mourning his adult daughter's passing from natural causes.…

Yeah, the North isn't about ostentation, but sometimes you really do feel like the show missed the boat on the idea that Ned was at worst one of the ten wealthiest men in the Seven Kingdoms.