Varys disappears when Tyrion does. Though he and Tyrion don't meet. We don't see Varys until he reappears in Kings Landing in Book V, nowhere near Tyrion.

If Sansa fills in for LS then you have the whole revenge thing going on, but you're dropping the whole weird magic-is-popping-up-all-over aspect of ASOIAF. Plus, you can't have Brienne's quest.

Why are you being so defensive? Did Potatoe666 get a little close to the bone here? Getting tired of being a haters-gonna-hate type this morning?

Because as a middle-aged type who enjoys Jezebel, but isn't your key demographic, the sniping does get old and comes off as envy more than anything else. Couldn't you use…

I have. I read it in high school. Then I went off and bought a key to it so I could understand what the hell I'd just read.

I think Groundhog Day's a much better movie than Back to the Future—Future is good, but Groundhog Day's just kind of brilliant, though I suppose Future is much more about the effects of time travel instead of Groundhog's repeat-day motif, which is basically a plot device. Still, it's brilliant.

That said, I kept…

Hasn't Martin said he won't write a rape scene from the POV of the victim? Yeah, I think he does have a tender spot. The books aren't nearly as graphic as the show. Theon's maiming and torture isn't actually scene—just the effects on Theon afterwards. Danaerys witnesses (and stops) a rape, but her own relationship…

Yep, I've wondered why Martin has protected Sansa's virtue that way—it's taken numerous plot twists to do it. It's not like Martin isn't willing to be pretty harsh in that way—Dani was pretty much traded away in Book 1 and then, of course, there's Theon. But Sansa's managed to survive intact among some pretty awful…

Yep, what I love about the Ned Stark twist, though, is that it's both unexpected (because of how Martin's constructed the close third-person narratives) and completely necessary. Ned Stark's death destabilizes the current regime and leads directly to a civil war. The civil war leads to the collapse of the North,…

Yeah, but it looks like he's got some tramp stamps.

Oh, Otzi, you slut.

That's actually pretty common—so much so that linguists study it—basically, by the third generation in the United States almost no one speaks the native language of their original immigrant group. This is even the case with Mexicans—where you have a lot of Spanish speakers and huge number of immigrants. So, yes, we…

Given how insanely slow and boring Dune was (I saw it in a theatre during its original run), I think it's quite possible for Jupiter to be a better movie.

This would have to be truly terrible for me not to just enjoy it for the visuals.

Yep—it's that disconnect they like to practice. Though, that too, isn't new. There have been other periods of anti-immigrant hostility. But, at the same time, there really is this ongoing assimilation that a certain openness of American culture makes possible.

One of the things that struck me in reading about some…

Yes, I'm well aware of the colonization done by Spain, Belgium, France, the Netherlands and Portugal. However, Britain's colonization was more widespread and, key to my point, they ran India for a couple of centuries and made English a standard second language in the second-most populated country on the planet. It's…

Yep, I know that—China's actually made multiple attempts over the last 100 years to get everyone on the same page linguistically. It finally seems to be working, but a surprising number of Chinese still don't understand Mandarin. (And the bar for "understanding" is pretty low—by their terms, I speak French—and I…

Yep. We actually believe that nation-of-immigrants thing for the most part (with some noisy dissension from the fringe elements.) We're also a larger country than most of the European countries (Does anyone emigrate *to* Russia?) and we haven't used immigration to simply counter dropping birth rates, which is…

My understanding is that the written language is not identical across the dialects.

I said nothing about the "average Chinese person". I said if a Chinese person wants to talk to the rest of the world—i.e. you'll find a wider variety of people speak English than Chinese. I never said whether that curious person was…

Eh, not if you want to communicate with the rest of the world. A lot of people in China know Mandarin, but relatively few people outside of it. I don't think that will dramatically change just because Mandarin's a pain-in-the-ass to learn for a lot people—particularly reading and writing it.

The widespread use of English as a second language predates modern technology by quite a bit. It's pretty much the British Empire's work—English is one of the official languages of India and is pretty much the standard second language there. Throw in the U.S. and some smaller, but still good-sized nations and you end…

Sure, that's part of it, but so is the low birthrate. Same with a lot of Europe—Greece and Italy, for example. The U.S. birthrate is only a bit below replacement levels,even at current historic lows, but still hasn't hit the levels of Japan and some other countries. It's not a terrible thing in and of itself just…