Ran

That is very impressive! I've never seen so many of the UK first of AGoT in one photo. And you say you acquired these all within the week? Did someone sell off their collection? You should try and get in touch with Stephen Youll about signing the ARC.

"The Witness" is now nominated for an Emmy in Outstanding Short Form Animation category. Up against episodes/sketches from Robot Chicken, SpongeBob SquarePants, Steven Universe,

Finished this a couple of days ago with Linda. On the whole, it had some highs and lows. The bathroom scene in episode 7 is one of he best things the show has ever done, and Robin in general was a great addition to the cast. The nostalgia of Starcourt Mall, the scoring and musical choices, the Mind Flayer's increasingly gruesome efforts -- good stuff. And the story was pretty tight -- 8 episodes was pretty much spot on (I'm slogging through the interminable final season of Jessica Jones which is once again padded out to 13 episodes and it's clear it would have been a better show with half as many, so the contrast stands out). That said, there's some real issues too. The kids besides Dustin and Eleven were basically afterthoughts this season -- I think Lucas's sister had more lines this season than he did! -- and Nancy and Jonathan were relegated to fifth wheel status (get it? Fifth wheel, fifth estate, because newspaper.... forget it) while on the adult side... oh boy. Hopper was turned into this ridiculous caricature. I thought that it'd be just the first episode, a parody of stereotypical dad behavior in some of the 80s teen comedy-romances, but it just went on and on with his basically being a Neanderthal in a Hawaiian shirt. Harbour seems like a lovely guy and a great sport, but there was only so much he could do with it, and so he played it broadly. Things improved toward the very end, but it was kind of painful to see him in those first episodes. And Billy... I wish they had given us another episode or two pre-body snatching with him to try and maybe hint more at some of the revelations that show up later in the season. The actor did well, but it was hard to develop much connection to a character whose final turn and sacrifice was supposed to carry some weight with the audience.

A complete numbered set is definitely very valuable and is worth thousands of dollars on the market, especially if it's complete (aka including the chapbooks from artists that Subterranean included).

There is no "greatest" jouster. Barristan did not win every tourney he rode in, Arthur Dayne didn't, etc. We do know that he defeated many notable knights in various tournaments, and appears to have always been a genuine contender for winning any tourney he entered. We know of three tourneys in which he rode, and he was second place in two of them (losing to Ser Arthur Dayne and Ser Barristan Selmy respectively) and the champion at Harrenhal.

Hmm! Couldn't find the 2010 book when I looked, but maybe I had the wrong pub date for it.

There's some print-run figures at Publisher's Weekly that are interesting. 2005's Flight of the Nighthawks and 2013's Magician's End were at 75k first print runs each, 1997's Rage of the Demon King had a 100k first print, 1988's Faerie Tale was at 150k (very different industry then). He seems to have held on to a pretty solid, steady readership. His last appearance on the NYT list appears to be 2008 and 2009 for the last and first entries in the Darkwar and Demonwar series respecively, however. He's written 5 Midkemia books since then that appaently have not cracked it.

Ah-ha. I had taken the argument to be that she went entirely unnoticed on the internet while racking up these sales. But if she was being heavily covered by the review sites and other online venues, then I guess it's more that the internet did notice her, she just didn't get much traction after the early push. Fair enough.

Yeah, the apples-to-oranges of it strikes me a bit. I did find evidence from a page from 2017 that her first book sold 30,000 copies across 3 print runs in 6 months (also claims that as of 2017 she's sold more than 600,000 books -- IIRC, TLoLL alone is over the 1 million mark these days). The overall point that she seemed to be achieving that without most of the common Internet sites taking note of her back then (Westeros, SFFWorld, etc.) is interesting. But it's not just even that -- per search trends there was never a point where people were searching more often for Martin than Lynch (there was one or two months where it was close, but most of the time there was a lot more interest in Lynch.) And Martin's book never made bestseller lists, whereas in paperback at least TLoLL appeared several times on Locus's aggregated bestseller list.... I admit, something feels a trifle odd about it all, looking more into her career and her output. Are we certain there weren't some shenanigans involved in those figures? Heard plenty of stories of calculated buys to get on bestseller lists, deliberate lowballing of author copies in bulk to pad sales, etc. in the past to make me wonder just a little bit. That, or they just had some kind of genius marketing plan that pushed a lot of them out early and under the radar? A promotion giving away or selling a lot of copies very cheap... Anyways, all a bit off topic.

Dayne's "inaction" did nothing to harm his reputation because it was understood that his lack of involvement was because as a Kingsguad he did as he was commanded, and it was simply assumed he was commanded in ways that kept him from the war. Whereas Mace Tyrell wasn't really under anyone's command, and merely opted to sit around leading an interminable siege. He _could_ have chosen to march north to join Rhaegar with a contingent from the Reach without compromising the siege, one supposes, but he did not. Accounts of Rhaegar's tourney victories or successes come from eyewitnesses who have no doubt that Rhaegar was the one who rode (Cersei, Barristan, Ned).

We know how large the Seven Kingdoms is because GRRM has a scale that he uses consistently. Ignore the "about South America size" because it's not like George exactly knows how big South America is! He was thinking more of "long continent" when he made that remark. Numerous statements of distance in the novels bear out that the Wall serves as a usable scale to measure 300 miles. That's been used to get very accurate areas and distances for the novels.

There's zero chance that Martin's first book has outsold Lynch's in the long run, and I admit I still find the claim that it outsold the firt year a bit suspect (Archive.org shows that TLoLL already had more ratings in year 2 after publication than Martin had in year 2 of her book's publication). Isn't this apple to oranges, anyways? Lynch was only hardcover the first year, while near as I can tell THE SUMMONER was straight to MMPB. Wert, what's the source on this statistic, re: first year sales? Goodkind's THE OMEN MACHINE (published 2013) has more ratings on Goodreads than Martin's debut novel (published 2017). I really think whatever odd blip there was regarding Martin's first year sales compared to TLoLL is not really indicative of anything useful beyond he vagaries of print runs. I suspect "internet enthusiasm" as seen on Goodreads is probably a very good proxy for sales. In fact, via Kameron Hurley, I found that Mark Lawrence got fellow fantasy authors to shares sales data to see if they correlated to the number of ratings you had on Goodreads... and it did.

That's weird, because, re: Goodreads, TLoLL has more than a dozen times the ratings as Martin's debut novel, thirty times the number of actual reviews, and a higher overall rating as well. I find it very, very unlikely that Martin's first book actually outsold TLoLL. Maybe briefly, in the near term, if there was a hiccup with reprints at Lynch's publisher. And if she's outsold him overall now, that's probably because she's a writing machine with numerous novels under her belt.

A Titancon query for those who may know: is there any programming scheduled for the Sunday, or is the coach tour and subsequent feast the whole of Sunday's events?

No fan fiction allowed.