Tales from the Perilous Realm

GAME OF THRONES Full cast pic

2009-09-03T15:41:08Z

All castmembers cast so far (courtesy of the Liftingfaces blog):

1. Sean Bean as Lord Eddard Stark
2. Jennifer Ehle as Lady Catelyn Stark
3. Lena Headey as Queen Cersei Lannister
4. Peter Dinklage as Tyrion Lannister
5. Nikolaj Coster-Waldau as Ser Jaime Lannister
6. Mark Addy as King Robert Baratheon
7. Tamzin Merchant as Daenerys Targaryen
8. Kit Harington as Jon Snow
9. Richard Madden as Robb Stark
10. Sophie Turner as Sansa Stark
11. Maisie Williams as Arya Stark
12. Jack Gleeson as Prince Joffrey Baratheon
13. Harry Lloyd as Viserys Targaryen
14. Alfie Owen-Allen as Theon Greyjoy
15. Iain Glen as Ser Jorah Mormont

I quite liked this pic that Liftingfaces had put up and thought it would be cool to share :-)

Ladies and gentlemen, The Wall

2008-06-24T00:25:36Z

A poster named NeilFaz posted this on the board today (in GC for some reason, if a GC mod can movie to ASoIaF General or Objects of Ice and Fire, that would be cool). The Wall and Castle Black in full 3D.

Very cool stuff :-)

Link:
http://asoiaf.westeros.org/index.php?showtopic=29211&st=0&gopid=1412284&#entry1412284

Anyone else been having trouble putting links on LJ? They haven't been showing up for me since I upgraded to Firefox 3 :-(

Music Monday

2008-06-23T13:17:33Z

Inspired by the board last week:

And as a bonus:

Damnit. I need to go rewatch that movie now.

I wants one!

2008-06-22T02:39:28Z

Okay, maybe not:

The daggits in the original BSG always freaked me out as one of my SF mags saw fit to tell me that inside that thing was an extremely disturbed monkey. When I got older I thought this was some kind of urban legend, but apparently they really stuck a 'trained acting monkey' * inside the daggit costume to get a 'more convincing animal-like movement'. Seriously, WTF? Did they clear that with ASPCA (US equivalent of RSPCA, I believe)?

This did lead me to realise that the new show hasn't made the most of its merchandising opportunities. Where are the Kara Thrace dolls with three different phrases ("We're going the wrong waaaaaay!" "Kara Thrace loves Leeee Adama!" and "You're a bastard!")? The Saul Tigh action figure with a removable eye? The Battlestar Pegasus playset with fully functioning torture chamber? The 'Felix Gaeta Sings 20 Colonial Classics' CD? I fear there's a whole market being missed out on here.

* Evidence here, since Livejournal won't let me post links for some unfathomable reason:

http://jimsmash.blogspot.com/2005/10/monkey-space-dog.html

Titus Pullo IS The Punisher

2008-06-14T00:46:09Z

This film looks totally bloody awful, but it does have Titus Pullo dispensing justice with machine guns, including the difficult-to-pull-off, dangling-upside-down-rotating-whilst-firing-two-machine-guns-simultaneously maneuver.

But the dialogue! No! It makes my ears bleed!

One to get on DVD to watch with mates whilst drunk, I think.

Confessions of a Dungeons & Dragons Player

2008-06-12T16:34:09Z

Warning: this is a seriously nerdy RPG discussion :-)

Hi, my name's Adam and I've been playing D&D for fourteen years. I started off in the early 1990s with computer games based on the rules: Eye of the Beholder and its sequels. In late 1994 some friends at school invited me to join the tabletop game and I got into it straight away. We had a huge gaming group - 12 people on some nights - and our DMs had to really work on their feet to make the game fun for so many people. Then everyone scattered off to university and we got our group down to 5-6 people playing regularly, which was better. We cycled through a few different DMs and played other games as well - the awesome Deadlands, the so-so Star Wars, the totally awful Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay - but D&D, then in what was known informally as '2.5' Edition, was the one we always came back to. My most memorable character was Thorin Axeforce (reprezent!), a dwarven fighter/cleric with a monstrously overpowered +7 magical battleaxe known as Deathswipe (yeah!) and bouts of periodic insanity. It was a Renaissance fantasy setting, so my character also had access to firearms and light artillery, and thanks to the Engineering nonweapon proficiency, actually built the world's first functioning gatling gun (which was destroyed in battle with the tarrasque, but that's another story).

Obviously, subtle and nuanced roleplaying was not our forte. But we had a hell of a lot of fun.

The release of D&D 3rd Edition in 2000 split the group: some people, most notably those who'd spent a ton of cash on 2E books, were not keen on crossing over. However, for the rest of us 3E actually succeeded in merging the 'classic' D&D experience with the more skill-based rules we'd seen in other games and resulted in a much more interesting game. We lost one of our players, and frankly our best DM, as result of the move, but in the long run we had a lot more interesting and varied games because of it. We also started playing other systems a lot more regularly as well (Cyberpunk turned out to be fun, Robotech even moreso but our various attempts at playing the World of Darkness games just cheesed us off). I also took over as default DM for 4-5 years and frankly, did a pretty good job. Also, the players, now being a few years older, were perhaps a bit more interested in narrative and story than before. For those wanting to be a writer, being a DM can be an interesting training ground. Having built an elaborate and impressive empire, it's definitely an experience to have four or five people trying to pull it apart on the grounds its economy doesn't work and its population level is not consistent with its real-world medieval antecedents, a bit like a writer having five or six editors delighting in tearing their MS apart. It helps build up a thick skin, certainly :-)

Unfortunately, our RPing died down 2-3 years ago. Another member of the group, Sanders, (whom I think Isis will remember as the "I earn £24K a year so everyone bow down to me," guy) took over as main DM after I got tired of it and his campaigns were awful, often making little sense. His way of dealing with a problem if it related to a rules mistake he made in a prior session was to completely rewind the campaign to that point and start again (no other DM I have ever encountered has even thought about this as a way of resolving problems). The game stopped being fun. Occasionally I joined in a session if Chris, our most experienced roleplayer overall, was DMing but otherwise avoided the game.

Last night our group got back together. In the year since the last time I played a session the group had picked up a new player, Sanders had improved as a DM (some of his campaigns now apparently get to sixth or seven sessions before he cheeses everyone off and the game collapses) and D&D's new, fourth edition had emerged. The game was fun, even though D&D 4th Edition is more broken than a wheelbarrow full of vases that has fallen off the side of the Empire State Building and we'll probably drop it if it doesn't perk up soon, but other than that it was really good to be hanging out with mates again, having a laugh, fighting bandits and stuff.

Whether I'll go back to DMing or whethere this is just a temporary means of seeing my mates again now I'm back remains to be seen, but certainly it was a laugh and we'll see where it goes from here.

Rothfussblog

2008-06-10T22:21:27Z

I keep meaning to check this more regularly, but meh, too many websites and too many blogs to visit. But check out Pat Rothfuss' blog if you have time. Very amusing, including his current competition to the see who can put his books in the daftest positions and take pictures of them. He also occasionally talks about progress on the much-delayed sequel to The Name of the Wind, The Wise Man's Fear.

Picture made of win:

Music Monday

2008-06-09T14:21:23Z

One of my favourite songs of all time, which only recently cropped up on YouTube:

Good riffs, solid chorus and fun lyrics. What more do you want?

There's a young boy in the queue
There's not much else here for him to do
He's had a drink, he's had a few
Down the pub on Hope Street

Dear old lady, you're looking thin
Got a shopping bag with your life in
Your old man's going through the bins
And so it goes on hope street

Rain on me come pouring down
Clean the dirt off this old town
Tell the sun to come around
And show his face on Hope Street

There's a fight right down the street
The betting shop has got him beat
He blew his money for the week
On a horse called Hope Street

No old faces out today
Someone took them all away
Cleaning up or so they say
The dirty face of Hope Street

Rain on me come pouring down
Clean the dirt of this old town
Tell the sun to come around
And show his face on hope street

Rain on me come pouring down
Clean the dirt of this old town
Tell the sun to come around
And show his face on hope street

Everyday I look at you
Dressed up in your ties of blue
Saying there's not much that you can do
To help the kids on Hope Street

You don't seem to even care
That it was you that put them there
You seem to think they like it there
Hanging out on Hope Street

Rain on me come pouring down
Clean the dirt off this old town
Tell the sun to come around
And show his face on hope street

It is confirmed.

2008-06-08T01:33:10Z

BSG goes off the air next week in both the UK and USA and won't be back for its final ten episodes until January 2009.

* expletive deleted * Just when it was getting good again. To rub it in, the producers have cheerfully promised a mid-season cliffhanger that's apparently bigger than New Caprica. Cheers for that.

On the plus side, this does mean we get 10 more webisodes that will bridge the two seasons and they're also going to be filming three TV movies that will air after Season 4.5 finishes next year and before the series is laid to rest for good. But that doesn't really make up for the fricking SEVEN MONTHS minimum we have to wait to see the next episode. WTH?

Trailers for next week's ep follow. Only watch if you don't mind pretty big spoilers and have watched this week's episode as well.

Oh goody, looks like this year's comedy episode! Or maybe not :-O

The July Meet-Up

2008-06-06T15:39:14Z

So what was originally going to be a small meet-up for the Steven Erikson London signing has now grown into a much larger gathering taking in several people's birthdays as well (Isis, Anna's and Sean's, I believe). With people from Ireland, Scotland and further afield coming over for it I thought it might be an idea to have a proper discussion about it.

So who's attending, first off? So far I think it's me, Isis, Sean, Silanah, Tomfoster and Anna who are pretty certain for it.

Strong possibilities I believe are Tenalpia, Zak & Needle, Peadar, Mo, Etrangere, Iceman, Williamjm, Slick Mongoose and perhaps some of our semi-newcomers, Peregrinus, Eloisa etc. Paddy also expressed an interest a little while ago. The 'Crombie said he may come during the day of the 5th. Anyone else? Mormont? Zollo? Vestrit?

On that subject shall we throw this open to other newbies and put up a post about it in the BwB section on the board? Or did we want it to be an 'in-crowd' only job?

The signing is on the 5th and I suppose people who want to go can slink off for an hour with their heaving backpacks with 7,700-odd pages of Malazan goodness to get signed (that'll be me then). But did we want to arrange anything else? If people are coming over from further afield did we want to make plans for this to be a 2 or 3-day thing? Or just wing it as we go?

Cheers everyone.

Important Info: The signing is at 1-2pm on Saturday, 5 July at Forbidden Planet in Shaftesbury Avenue.

Hey Hey, My My Music Monday

2008-06-02T13:23:33Z

Two versions of the same classic song here. Ladies and gentlemen, Mr. Neil Young in 1985 with an acoustic version:

And doing a souped-up electric take in 2000 at Wembley, Gallagher Senior:

And yeah, this is the song that inspired Kurt Cobain's suicide letter. But still awesome nevertheless.

The Best SF&F Authors According to Us

2008-05-11T17:04:19Z

Just finished putting together the results from this vote on the board. 85 people voted for 101 authors, with the Top Ten results being:

10. Frank Herbert
9. Joe Abercrombie
8. Stephen R. Donaldson
7. Steven Erikson
6. China Mieville
5. Robin Hobb
4. Gene Wolfe
3. R. Scott Bakker
2. JRR Tolkien
1. George RR Martin

Perhaps predictable, but I didn't expect Joe to be in there. He's been embraced like very few other new authors have been on the board and Last Argument of Kings in particular got a fantastic reception. The clear contender for the Campbell Award this year, IMO.

Scott Bakker's high placing was also surprising. I expected him to maybe hit the Top Ten, but not get that high, since for every person who loves his work someone else seems to hate him. But nevertheless a deserved place. The Prince of Nothing is the Dune of epic fantasy, a thoughtful and philosophical work which doesn't shirk on the huge battles or character development fronts.

Anyway, it was fun (if mildly tedious) counting this up and the results were very interesting. Not a single vote for JK Rowling at all. Not even one. Very surprising.

Greetings to my Virtual Friends!

2006-12-11T02:06:43Z

Back in May, after meeting thirty-odd members of the BwB and realising most of them had Livejournals, I decided it would be great to put them all on my friends list. Procrastination being my nature, I just got round to doing it. Whoops. Sorry folks.

Due to a semi-catastrophic cock-up at work - I got busted for breaking a new regulation, only for the people doing the busting to find out that the reason I'd broken it was that my manager hadn't bothered doing the training he'd been told to do a month earlier resulting in the store management team being grilled over a slow fire - I've had the last three weeks off work, paid, whilst they sort out the mess. And I still don't know when I'm going back. Probably end of the week, but have been told it could go into the following week. Whilst this sounds great in theory, in practice it's getting dull now. I'm too skint to actually get out and do stuff (a result of the damage the Amsterdam trip has done to my finances: well worth it though) so I'm stuck around all day watching old Seinfeld DVDs and posting even more crap than is normal on various forums. What's worse I'm out of my normal reading cycle (I normally read at work during lunch) and have taken a fortnight to get 120 pages into Altered Carbon. Sigh.

What's really annoying is that my sleeping habits have gotten completely out of whack. After three weeks of going to bed at 2-3am and getting up at 11am, getting used to waking up at 7.30am is going to be a struggle. Need to start training myself back into the habit, I suppose.