Having moved from Sweden to San Francisco over the last year I've had the Eurovision go from the major TV event of the year, where the entire country comes together in an explosion of simultaneous deep investment and withering disdain, to virtually invisible. I looked for a stream but couldn't find one, also to my…

A good half the songs have actual lyrics in Icelandic, and they're often kind of awful. It's just that Icelandic is hard to understand and Icelandic in general and in Jónsi's falsetto in particular sound awesome, so no one really cares.

Different instance. Wyman Manderley, a northern lord who lost sons at the Red Wedding, serves some very large meat pies at a feast hosted by the Freys and Boltons. A few days before this a pair of exceptionally rude Freys went missing. He takes great care in making sure that the Boltons and Freys get to eat some pie,…

I've read quite extensively on the topic, on the Guardian and elsewhere.

Not sure what guarantee you mean. If the US want to have Assange extradited from Sweden they may request it when he's here, and that request will be evaluated by the courts per relevant laws and treaties. Relevant laws and treaties do not allow extradition for capital crimes and political crimes. Previously the courts…

From Cheryl's perspective: Polly stole her beloved brother, then got said brother murdered, and is now trying to usurp Cheryl's place as Blossom heir for her supposed half-breed spawn.

Having cheap filler to give the player the thinnest possible excuse to go everywhere is pretty much expected in the triple-A open-world style games nowadays. I'm not entirely sure why, if it's explicitly a content length thing or it's that players feel that the world is "empty" if there are any map features that don't…

Both spellings are acceptable spellings for both concepts, although gauntlet is more common for both. The original English version of running through two lines of people hitting you with sticks was "gantelope", itself a bastardization of the Swedish "gatlopp" borrowed during the 30 years war.

Having played a little further (but not a lot, as I got interrupted by mass effect): there's very little force combat overall, and when there is combat there's often some puzzle-like trick to the encounter. For instance, early on there's a fight against a small horde of robots which is quite hard, but you can send a…

I haven't read any of the Iron Fist comics so I can't really speak to that. Far as I can tell he's intended to be Very Good at Fighting in the text of the show. 15 years of training by mystical not-shaolin monks, selected as the next in a long line of immortal iron fists and all that before he buggers off — after all…

Having also finished, I'll say that it did grow on me and overall it was a better show than my very low expectations from the initial reviews. About par with Daredevil S2. I don't think it was particularly good, but amusing enough. I'm not at all surprised that reviewers given the first 6 episodes would arrive at a…

I've been enjoying the game on the whole, mainly because the worldbuilding and the incidental dialogue is very good and it's mostly what I'm here for.

He's living proof that no matter where we were born, what color our skin, what creed we follow or what type of plumbing arouses us — we all still carry within us the unifying capability of being giant flaming douchebag wazzocks. It's like the cynical approximation of heartwarming.

Caveat: I haven't started on tides of numanuma yet.

Maybe it's the bookreader hindsight talking but the "protomolecule" has been pretty much magic from the first time it appeared. That's fine by me, indistinguishable from and all that, but if what you want is a truly grounded and realistic piece of near future sci-fi, well, this isn't it. It's an operatic space…

He went to Högre Samskolan and then Industriell Ekonomi. I'm not sure it's possible to go through that level of sustained douche immersion during your formative years and come out completely intact.

I thought "The Vital Abyss" was excellent and fascinating, "The Churn" was good and "Gods of Risk" a bit naff. They're all worth buying if you want more Expanse after reading the main series, but Abyss is the only one I felt offered more than (interesting!) backstory.

There is the ongoing hot, steaming love triangle with Naomi, Holden, and the coffee machine.

There are a few spinoff novellas from the main Expanse book series, one of which is written entirely from the perspective of Cortazar (the empath-ectomized scientist) as he looks back on what lead to his captivity. I'd rate it as the best written of the bunch.

Around half of landmine victims are civilians and landmines have had no significant impact on any war since 1930, but they have served to do fun things like make 10%-20% of the arable land in some parts of northern Africa unusable. They're an inaccurate, cheap weapon of terror, that works only by being…