Werthead

Tried uploading the map of Westeros to the Wiki but no dice I'm afraid. I hit Upload and it looks like it's working, but then times out and goes to a white screen, and going to the target URL doesn't work either. Tried it two or three times to no avail.

Ran, is it possible to find out the answer to the long-standing question of if Asshai is on the Essosi continent or on a Yet Further Eastern landmass? It's kind of hard to write an article on the Jade Sea without knowing if it is a whole other ocean or just a giant version of the Black Sea (or the Circle Sea from the Discworld books) with Asshai (and presumably Yi Ti and the Shadow Lands) on the far shore but still on the same continent as Qarth and the rest. Or is this a R-(the World Book)-AFO? ;)

The Star Trek and Lost bases are small? :stunned: Looking through Memory Alpha and Lostpedia pretty much all the images are covered by the Copyrighted-but-it's-Fair-Use clause, which as I said I'm guessing extends to publicity photos (although a lot of those pictures are screen-grabs rather than official screenshots released by Paramount or ABC). I conclude that means that the various TV series articles can be illustrated with screenshots once it gets underway, but that actual physically-created media, like artwork, is out of bounds unless specifically released into the public domain (like your map) or justifiable under fair use for illustrative purposes (we can put up the cover of The Art of Ice and Fire but none of the interior art). Didn't the Wikipedia team conclude that we'd gone as far as we could without getting hit with tons of AFDs? Personally I think we were pushing it with Historical Wars, War of the Usurper and Strongholds of A Song of Ice and Fire (some of which I created but hey ;) ), which are not really notable outside of the series itself. The benefit of the Wiki (either one) is that there is no limit to notability. If you want an individual article on the birds nesting in the Red Keep's roof you can do that. If you mean we should try to campaign to change Wikipedia's rules, I'm not sure that the current system (broad pages on Wikipedia, detailed pages on the franchise's dedicated Wikia) isn't a decent way of dealing with the issue. Meh, you just need to start the ball rolling and others will eventually turn up. If we rustled up a dozen people willing to work on modding Medieval 2 for Westeros, I'm sure there's plenty of people out there willing to write a two-paragraph article on the Inn of the Kneeling Man.

It seems to be working, in a very slow and creaky fashion, but yes it is up again :) No shiny logo, but uploads seem to be possible. May have spoken too fast. The 'edit page' button has vanished so you can't change anything.

It is good, but they usually restrain themselves to quotations from the books and tend towards brief summaries. They don't always bring in other sources (such as GRRM's comments in the SSM, the RPG etc) either. The Concordenance in the Citadel here on Westeros.org is also an excellent resource which I was using many years before I joined the board :) And the map there is the most definitive one of Westeros so far.

Now it's not working at all. :stunned:

It's admin-only at the moment:

Yeah, I remember this shitstorm and people having to bash heads to stop people using them. Surely there must be a different situation on Wikia though, as many other Wikias have absolutely tons of copyrighted pictures and art that they put up under fair use and vast companies such as ABC and Paramount seem to have zero problems with it. In the case of Lostpedia and Memory Alpha, the official sites recommend those Wikias as resources, and the writers of both Lost and the new Star Trek movie say they've used those resources before. Yet neither company seems to have abandoned their rights to that material. Does this have something to do with TV screenshots being produced specifically for publicity purposes and can be used under fair use, whilst a picture from the interior of an ASoIaF calendar or the RPG are not and thus cannot? I wanted to ask about that map as I wanted to use it on the Wikia. So I can go ahead, modify it for specific purposes and put it up on there without a problem as long as I credit it to you?

Yeah, being told that I couldn't copy pages that I had created in the first place from Wikipedia to the board Wiki even though that's the point of it, and it was something allowed with guidelines by every other Wiki I'd been involved with, was seriously off-putting. It isn't starting another initiative from scratch, the Wikia is there already and is a very good framework for what can be done. There are additional benefits of having a SoIaF Wikia, such as it being 'plugged in' to the network of many other Wikias (so if you're a contributor to the WoT Wikia or the Lost one or anything else, you can edit all of them). There's also the value of having access to assistance and advice from more experienced contributors from other Wikia pages as well. As Ran has said, though, the value of having a Wiki plugged into the board is also quite high and there's currently ten times as much content on the board wiki as the Wikia one (although a lot of that is indeed copy-and-pasted and broken up versions of the Wikipedia articles). Wikis also pick up popularity as people work on them. At the moment people log into the Wikia, see it doesn't even have a proper front page and only 50 entries, and log out. They might then find the board Wiki, see a morass of red links and broken images on every page, and log out. If they see the number of articles rising and the look of the pages improving, then they may feel inclined to stay and contribute. Having had to deal with some dubious categories created by other people on the WoT Wikia, I must admit the appeal of a clean-slate approach on the ASoIaF Wikia and setting up something more streamlined and user-friendly from scratch is strong (I call this the 'JJ Abrams looking at the Star Trek movie script' effect), whilst at the same time it seems silly to divide resources and efforts between two identical projects. Certainly being able to upload images onto the Wikia does make me favour it at the moment, and as I said before copy-pasting information back to the board Wiki and vice versa should not be a huge problem.

All the Wikia sites had a bit of a facelift a few months ago and now seem to act a bit differently to Wikipedia and the Wiki here, with better search engines and automatic identification of links to already-existing articles (i.e. when you type in say [[Wes...]], 'Westeros' immediately pops up as a suggested link along with 'Westerlands' and other possibilities). It also has no problems hosting images, and having created and uploaded 56 maps to the WoT Wikia last week, I know this for a fact :)

This is something I meant to raise a while back. When the idea of a dedicated ASoIaF Wiki was first raised, we tried to get one done on Wikia but were turned down for some reason. So Ran created the linked to on the board. However, shortly after this Wikia seemed to relax its policies and there are now dozens of new entertainment-based Wikias out there, and a bunch of non-Wikia-based Wikis have moved over to it because, frankly, Wikia rocks. Very easy to use, even moreso than standard Wiki, and adding images and things is very straightforward. I've been working a lot on the Wheel of Time Wikia in the last few weeks, adding maps to the nation guides, filling in blanks in the history of the nations from the World book and so forth, and it's been great. Some bright spark, possibly unaware of the board wiki, created the 'new' SoIaF Wikia a while back even though it is in a very embryonic state at the moment. It's also got a number of copyright-infringing images that need to be brought under control. I much prefer using Wikia to the more basic Wiki system the board is using, but at the same time it seems futile to start duplicating efforts and ending up with two Wikis doing the same thing (although at last count there were three or four Middle-earth ones, and there's at least two WoT ones). I suppose what I'm asking is the doability of switching to Wikia, porting over the good articles and redoing the bad ones (there's a shedload of dead links on the existing one as well, from where we moved them over from Wikipedia). At the same time we do lose the convenience of people being able to use their Westeros.org logins to use the Wiki and keeping the image situation under control could be an issue, much moreso for ASoIaF (where there is tons of great art people will be tempted to put up) than for WoT (where there's not much about). This is where copyright becomes an issue. ToweroftheHand have, I believe, asked permission from Amoka and other artists to reproduce their work on their websight that they run and own themselves. Copyright is a much more complex issue on Wikis. On Wikipedia itself you cannot add any art unless it is, effectively, in the public domain or the creator wants to release it into the public domain. We had to go and delete all of Amoka's artwork that was being used on Wikipedia because of that. On Wikia it appears you can use copyrighted material with permission (Lostpedia, also on Wikia, uses official ABC publicity photos and they retain copyright, and Tor Books have given WoT Wikia permission to use the chapter heading icons and some of the maps) but it's an area you certainly don't want to be straying into without taking care.

Ysabel has been optioned as a movie. Interesting. I wonder if this will go anywhere or, if like Lions of Al-Rassan, it's going to get stuck in development hell for the next ten years?

He has been working on a new book due for release in 2010 and, as is traditional with him, he isn't discussing it until it's done.

David Eddings on why he wrote The Belgariad: he was in a bookshop fretting about why his earlier mainstream novels had failed (not taking into account that they were shit) and picked up a copy of The Lord of the Rings, laughing that "Oh, is that thing still around?" He then saw it was on its 48th printing, saw dollar signs, and ran home to start drawing a map and populating it with thinly-veiled Viking/Medieval European/Russian knock-offs. So The Belgariad is based on the myth that if you take something popular and write a shittier version of it, you can make money. Apparently proving the myth true, as well.

It may be that I stayed up to 4am to watch The Station Agent (excellent) and I'm starting to hallucinate, but did anyone else think it odd that GRRM used the word 'bean' three times at the start of his blog entry? Now that would be a triumph of awesome casting :)

Yup, and Kay said in an interview that the landmasses in Tigana and Arbonne are on the same world. So that links all of his books together quite nicely. A bit weird actually, since he's not the sort of author who appears to be overtly concerned with that kind of continuity and worldbuilding detail.

McCarthy was very good in the last season of The Wire. However, he hasn't appeared in anything he's directed. Combining the two (acting and directing) can be pretty tricky. Some actors can do it like Mel Gibson and Eddie Olmos, but most seem to prefer to separate the two jobs.

The only overtly fantastical thing is the slightly weird bit near the end where we are told that the shared world which appears in Lions, Sarantine and Last Light, is a sort of halfway house between Fionavar (here called Finar), the one true world, and others (i.e. our world). Aside from confirming that all of Kay's books take place in the same multiverse, this has zero impact on events and can be safely disregarded :)

We seem to have let the old thread die, which is a shame. Anyway, I'm going to be rereading Kay over the next year or two, and hopefully pick up Ysabel for the first time and try again to get through the Fionavar books. In the meantime, here's a review of The Lions of Al-Rassan:

[quote name='Loras' post='1460388' date='Jul 29 2008, 13.05']Yeah the chapters are the same, but I am sure that the cover of Spectra Pulse said that the chapter was an abridged version.[/quote] * reaches over to pile of copies * Nope. But I do recall GRRM saying the chapter was 'slightly abridged'. I remember the sample chapter of ACoK in the back of AGoT was called 'slightly abridged' and all that was missing was the last two paragraphs (the sample ended with Balon saying he was going to carve himself a kingdom as Urron did 5,000 years ago; the full chapter had Theon's "You're mad!" and Balon laughing at him just after that), so whether that's the case or the full chapter is significantly longer remains to be seen.

That's the full chapter from Spectra Pulse, nothing has been taken out of it at all. I remember reading the Cersei sample chapter from AFFC and thinking it wasn't long, but it takes up a decent amount of pages in the novel. The difference in perceptions of size between reading something on the screen and in a book is quite surprising.

Just found time to sit down and read this. Now I feel like retching. No-one does rat-eating better than GRRM :ack:

I have been meaning to re-read Lions for some time, before my images of it are spoiled by the forthcoming (ish) movie and since my mum lives near Valencia and seeing that countryside really helped me get a better grip on the feel of the book (since Lions is a riff on El Cid). Also, the same for Arbonne, since my dad lives in the south of France. No relatives in Italy though, so Tigana will have to wait for now

I think GGK and Bakker's writing styles are comparable, but they go in totally different directions with it. GGK is broadly optimistic without being cloying and seems to have a real belief in humanity. RSB, to put it mildly, is pessimistic and cynical. Both are fantastic writers and I would rank them alongside one another solidly in the highest tier of modern epic fantasy.

Fionavar is so different to his other books that I'd actually take the position that if all you've read of Guy Gavriel Kay is The Fionavar Tapestry, then you actually haven't read Guy Gavriel Kay at all GGK's contribution to The Silmarillion is usually dramatically overstated (not by GGK himself, who has said in the past his contribution was relatively minor). He helped Christopher Tolkien smooth over some of the rougher passages towards the end of the book. Amusingly, given that CT unfairly gets a lot of flak for the (relatively small) parts of the Sil that did involve the creation of new material, most of that stuff was actually GGK's.