At the very least it's a lowpoint for TNG, so I'll second it.

So it don't bump into things? (Just a guess.)

I beg to differ. Even Oregon's deserts are beautiful and sometimes strange (desert snows, love it)...

I own these! They're great. Though I wish they'd had bigger, wall-sized ones (at the time at least, they didn't).

I know this was meant as a cynical pulling back of the curtain/taking the rose-colored glasses away comment, and that's not lost on me, but at the same time, I can't help but wish more "wars" could be fought cold, specifically in tech races and science races and the like. Nobody's going to get behind the program in…

Heh.

I'll pipe in, since we're all listing our favorites and reading history with the Culture...

The Welsh flash IS undeniably bad ass.

Slightly reassuring that they admit as much.

Re: the parallels, I knew it wasn't 1:1 but that's a pretty fun list I hadn't seen before. (I'm only just now reading book 4, and by the 2nd chapter I was already drawing the Spain/Dorne connection!)

Valyria is Rome makes a lot of sense. Especially in how vulgarized versions of Valyrian culture and language are what makes up most of the main continent (size-wise; meaning Essos).

Yeah, I said that. I don't know about the Targaryens being French, but sure. Andals to Anglo Saxons and First Men to Celts, though, absolutely. All sorts of druidy lore washed over by the septinarian (c.f. trinitarian) more literalized and dogmatized spirituality, worshiping hard-written symbols rather than…

Nailed it.

Absolutely. Well parsed! Haha.

When I first saw this image, I assumed archaeologists had uncovered giraffe gas masks from the Bronze Age or something.

It's not Earth literally but GoT has always had TONS of parallels between our world and theirs, geographically, culturally, geopolitically... Westeros is a like a conquered-by-the-white-man, taken-from-the-natives North America — but the world is also a funhouse mirror of the Old World — Westeros stands like a…

"I wonder if there's a way to genetically trigger the tumor growth your elderly grandfather is suffering so instead it evolves him into some kind of armored mole creature with super intelligence. Using science."

As if it wasn't all terrifying enough, that last sentence... basically says, "The only thing to do is try not to break your bone-body as you turn into a solid statue of human bone and eventually die frozen into some horrific caricature of yourself and your tortured body!" (...right?)

I agree Richard Dawson was pretty great, but now I have to ask: What material were his shoes made of that nobody could feel them? There's no info on Wikipedia about these shoes you speak of.

I haven't read them, but Veronica Roth's Divergent trilogy sounds unbearably preposterous and far-fetched. Even as a fan of far-fetched dystopias and world-as-metaphor, I can't get behind the synopsis for that one.