Yes, because people who are marginalized by a culture won't notice it if you don't label it! Everything will be fine as long as you pretend that everything is fine. There's no benefit to giving people a place to feel explicitly safe and comfortable. On an unrelated note, people who speak out against racism are the…

Actually I watched the episode in that two-day span, so you don't need to feel guilty!

Well I didn't know that at that point. He'll always be alive in slashfic. And the brojen Tumblr tag. http://pembroke.tumblr.com/…

Aaaaaand they fake a lot of the forest stuff anyway, because real forests are a pain to shoot in.

My favorite one was the episode where Walt is spinning the gun on the glass table on his patio…they built a rig to stop the gun in just the right spot, but it was too hard to airbrush out after the fact and they ended up making a CG table and gun anyway.

That's a fair point, but real-world elements used in compositing are generally referred to as "practical elements." Companies which supply effects like fire, water, and bullet hits shot against green are referred to as "practical effects houses." In this case, it's a helpful distinction from fully CG characters.…

That whole album was actually pretty damn great. The insanely creepy Jim Jones song still makes my skin crawl.

It's interesting to note how many of the creature FX are practical—direwolves, the bear, many birds, horses in close-up (even for falls and deaths!), giants (compositing), White Walkers (makeup), and I'm sure others. I think that helps sell the more fantastical FX (dragons, wights) and allows the vfx budget to go…

Ahh, I didn't assume that, because the dragons really are CG characters. What about the composite do you find "embarrassing"? Blend, lighting match, scale, hair roto? I'm curious because I tend to visually register the wolves as "just part of the world," even moreso than, say, Brienne's bear, which I assumed was CG…

Well, Jojen's actor is 24. Some googling confirms that Isaac Hempsted-Wright is 15, though, so keep it in your pants for a few years. Or ship Jojen with Jon Snow, they can go be story-stymieing snow buddies.

In other words, you're finding the CG stuff convincing, and the real stuff unconvincing…which is one hell of a compliment to the amazing VFX team on this show.

That's sort of funny, because most (almost all) of the shots with direwolves use actual wolves shot on green-screen with stuntpeople and composited in a little bigger than life size, the same way they do the giants. See: https://www.youtube.com/wat… , or for a longer breakdown of how they shoot with the wolves, https:/…

Yes. Mark Hemingway.

Well then why the hell isn't Kit Harington starring in Hairspray on Broadway right now? You tell me that.

If Jon Snow had only been born in the Crownlands. "You know nothing, Jon Waters."

You might be right about that. That said, I wouldn't have to go side by side with the original game to tell the differences in the new footage. I don't think that things like animation, character design, and level design are trivial, and I wouldn't mistake the new "test" footage for the old game—the improvements are…

as it turns out, yes

To be fair, the video suggests that it's a conceptual build, and so I'd assume those aren't even close to final textures. You'd want to be looking at systems like sky and water, character design and animation, level design, and especially gameplay mechanics. I see new moves, an all-new combat system, monster…

I think you can safely assume that any normal human's first encounter with the level of violence that Lara experiences on a daily basis might cause some trauma, yeah. If you're intent on doing a prequel, this might seem like the most obvious dramatically honest way to go. There's a lot in the details of the first game…

"I would find the presence of people who are not like me embarrassing and uncomfortable, even though I ostensibly have no problem with them. I would prefer to prevent people who are not like me from appearing in simulations of real life. I also have a problem with people who don't share my random distaste and who…