The deadline to nominate your favorite podcast for a Parsec Award is approaching; on May 31st, nominations end and the Parsec awards committee gets very busy.
Not familiar with the Parsec awards?
Back in ye olde 2006, the award was created to honor and recognize this newfangled Podcasting medium. The awards have a strong focus on Speculative Fiction (with categories for original content, the creative process, or just talking about favorite entertainment, etc.)
Last Sunday’s Episode of Game of Thrones “Laws of Gods and Men” featured a stirring testimonial about my favorite Baratheon brother, Stannis.
I’m still on my Game of Thrones blogging hiatus (while Season Four is ongoing), but here’s a Stannis-related post I wrote last year on my supplementary material backup blog, one of the elements packaged with my In Defense of Stannis Baratheon post.
Hope everyone is enjoying Season Four, I certainly am.
Being King Wasn’t as Awesome as Renly Imagined
No discussion of Stannis would be complete without addressing the implications of him assassinating his brother, Renly, via magic.
Stannis’ defeat of Renly was accomplished using an unconventional form of warfare, and I think it warrants a discussion, as well as comparison to other examples of unconventional warfare that are seen in Game of Thrones, but don’t seem to get the same negative associations of shadow assassin demon-babies.
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Over the weekend, I went to see the new Spider-Man movie (the second one featuring Andrew Garfield as Peter Parker.)
My daughter, who hadn’t seen the first one, really wanted to see ASM2 because of the rumored X-Men: Days of Future Past tease in the movie’s end credits. (My not-yet-quite-a-teen daughter is a big Jennifer Lawrence fan.)
Keeping my fanboy glee hidden, I agreed.
“If you *really* want to see it, I guess I’ll go see this ‘Spidery Man‘ movie.”
Spoilery thoughts below. Seriously, if you haven’t seen the movie, don’t read my post.
It’s May, so I went through my social media feeds and grabbed all the MicroStories I’d tweeted during the month of April.
As a reminder, these represent story-essences composed using no more than 130 characters (so I could tweet them with the hashtag #MicroStory.)
Usually, I only tweet Science Fiction and Fantasy #MicroStories. One day, science will catch up, and I’ll be thought of as a prophet, yo. (It could happen. Don’t pop my balloon.)
For really great #MicroStory action, please follow @MicroSFF, the Twitter account that inspired me to participate in this minimalist writing exercise. That feed puts out great science fiction and fantasy MicroStories all the time.
Okay, like most people who blog, I get delighted when I get comments. I am rarely delighted however when a spam comment makes it through WordPress’ otherwise excellent spam filter. A few days ago, I was delighted.
I Totally Look Like This When I’m Blogging, Just Ask My Wife.
My email let me know that my blog post Defending Magic in Game of Thrones had a comment waiting for moderation. Right on. It’s a great post! (I might be biased.) But I was unprepared for the effusive praise in the comment.
George RR Martin’s next installment in the A Song of Ice and Fire saga, The Winds of Winter, won’t be out this year. Maybe it’ll be out next year. Maybe.
In the meantime, I felt the need to read some compelling fantasy that would be similar in many ways.
There are tons of great fantasy books available and there is no end of lists of suggested reading while waiting for the next GRRM epic. Although I should be reading something new, I had a yen to re-read something something great, that I knew would hit the spot.
It was high time to re-read Roger Zelazny’s Amber Chronicles.
Season Four of Game of Thrones, HBO’s excellent adaptation of George RR Martin’s saga A Song of Ice and Fire, kicked off in the first week of April. I’m pretty excited. Stupidly excited.
People following my blog are aware that I’d published over a dozen Game of Thrones-related articles last year, and at the beginning of this year I set myself a challenge to crank out a GoT post every week in preparation for the new season.
Now that the new season has started, I’m taking a break from posting new articles (I’m too busy reading everyone’s reactions to the current episodes), but I wanted to package up links to my 2014 pre-season postings, like I did for my 2013 collection.
This is my final post discussing our viewing of the end of Breaking Bad. Two posts ago, I had a recap of the last eight episodes of the season, and last post I discussed some topics more or less relevant to the final season. Now I’m going to express my final thoughts on the entire series. (I’ll be short. After all, I’ve already put out series of blog posts at the end of each season. How much more can I say?)
Last post, I announced that my wife and I had just finished watching the final episodes of Breaking Bad. That previous post was a season recap that probably everyone skipped reading (not an unwise decision: either you’ve seen the show and don’t need the recap or you’ve not seen the show and SHOULDN’T read that recap)
This post will my observations on the final season. (Post 3 will be my observations on the entire series.)
That Coffee Can’t be as Good as Gale Boetticher’s. That Stuff was the Bomb, Yo.
Season finales have a tough task in general. They have to wrap things up in a satisfying way, there’s a pressure to refer back to things that have happened over the years, besides resolving plot issues, there are emotional closures that need to be crafted, and the final episodes need to be surprising. It’s no fun if it’s too obvious or predictable what’s going to happen. But things can’t be too surprising. Things should make sense.
I’m going to be talking about the last eight episodes of Season Five Breaking Bad – the last eight episodes of the entire series. Breaking Bad is too great a television show to be spoiled, so if you’re not up to date:
Recently, my wife and I watched Felina, the final episode of AMC’s excellent drama Breaking Bad. We have different reactions springing from a common root emotion: she’s missing the show because (quite frankly) it was awesome, but I’m glad we’re done because (quite frankly) it was crazy intense. Also awesome.
I need to have some television downtime where my nerves aren’t all jangled and on edge. (Luckily, I’ve read all of the A Song of Ice and Fire books so this season of HBO’s Game of Thrones won’t sucker punch me the way the last episodes of Breaking Bad did. Probably.)
I Can't Possibly Be Wrong All the Time 