Honestly, I always thought she was aware that Joffrey was a psycho, but had sort of resigned herself to it. There's a whole exchange she has in the earlier seasons — two of them in fact — when she acknowledges that Joffrey turned out bad (one she says essentially that he was a sweetie when he was young but somewhere…

I also grew up with both of those. But as I said in another part of this comment board, for every gem from Moebius there were three pieces of fetish porn form Corben and the like. I picked it up again in the early 90s and I was like, "every story in this involves rape. What's with these people?"

I might give it a shot. I am a big sci-fi nerd at a lot of levels — I mean, I have 30 feet of bookshelves filled with it, everything from Douglas Adams and A A Attanasio to John Varley and Roger Zelazny. If anything my tolerance for badly executed science fiction is less than it was, you know?

It's the problem of confusing the self with the information that we recall. There's an interesting question as to whether the two can really be separated. That's why Alzheimer's is scary. Is it "you" anymore without memories?

Damn with faint praise, as they say.

Haven't seen this. I remember Heavy Metal magazine though, which is I think still publishing.

That's true. But at the same time, Jamie really threw himself into it — at least the fighting skills part. It was as though he said "holy hell, I don't have to listen to my ad anymore and can get into what I am really wanting to do: fight people." His value as a guardsman was all about his fighting skills. His value…

Yeah I know. But it is a show that has one hell of a fight coordinator, for example. Yes it's a bit of nerd-wanking— I've a passing familiarity with sword fighting myself, though I am far from an expert — but I really did appreciate that they do swordplay scenes without trying to make it look like everyone is a…

What about Maculay Culkin in Party Monster? I thought that was pretty damned good, and he and Seth Green both showed some real chops. In fact I thought Culkin was especially on point as self-centered and near-sociopath, while showing at the same time what made him human (and the scenes with his mother on the whole…

Actually as I understood it the Lannisters were a fallen family a generation before Tywin — they had money but were relatively powerless (an echo of the "resource curse? possibly). If you have gold and little else you are vulnerable. Tywin made it his business to lay the groundwork to stop rebellions and consolidate…

Thousands of comments in. But oh well….

The Vervoids look to me like low rent HR Giger. Maybe that's what they
were going for, but it looks just bizarre. I feel like the writers must
have dropped a shit ton of acid and then went through the liquor cabinet after going through Giger's book.

There's one called Finity by John Barnes. Barnes has a background in sociology and actually wrote a whole essay on using excel and economic models to make science-fiction worlds, which is actually pretty useful and interesting for any writer I think.

Um, no, not really - there was a brief German Soviet in the 20s and such governments cropped up elsewhere in industrialized Europe then, but they were (brutally) put down forthwith.

Actually, speaking of which, West of Eden is all right. In that one the dinosaurs never die out and human evolve in the Americas form New World monkey species (there were some indigenous primates to the New World in our timeline but they got out-competed by rodents). Anyhow, I think it was an interesting idea.

One guy who writes some interesting alternate history — mostly as short stories— is Stephen Baxter.

On a more serious note…

Yeah I know, that sort of works, though honestly he looks younger… maybe it's the chubbiness.

THIS. The prejudices apparent in the cruel comments about Martha and the woman who says she couldn't be a doctor because of her color were the kinds of moments that should have appeared all the damned time.

Small historical note: Ptolemy XIII was a bit older than that when Caesar shows up on the scene. I guess he would have been about 14 when he forces his sister Cleopatra to flee to Syria and 15-16 when Caesar comes to Egypt. Cleopatra was in her twenties. Cleopatra made some very smart moves like trying to cozy up to…