Ran

I don't know about you, but Morgoth and Sauron and Gríma are beings who are evil for the desire of domination or conquest or fame, and meet ends unambiguously suited to corrupted persons, according to their deserts. There is a moral clarity to what is good and evil in Tolkien, a clear indication (especially in LotR) of there being distinct good acts and evil acts and good motives and evil motives. George's view is that in his own work, he hews closer to what he sees as reality, not just that good motives can lead to evil ends, but are they really even good motives is something to question. From Letters, he's pretty clear about Morgoth not having any "good" beginning at all, nothing he did was rooted in wanting to make things orderly or better. Sauron followed him, and while his bent was "order", it was order that he would impose with deceits and violence and would benefit no one but him. And so on. I don't know, I think George understands Tolkien just fine. Tolkien's works are rife with discussion of good and evil in a way that they are not with GRRM. Just in a facile way, I find over 100 references to "evil" in just Letters, and nearly 300 in LotR, compared to fewer than 75 across all of ASoIaF. Doesn't mean George doesn't write about all sorts of things going on that Tolkien would explicitly describe as "evil", but George's temperament and moral view, I think, leads him to shy away from the word as too powerful and clear, overwhelming the moral ambiguities. It's rare to see him discuss ETA: Just to press the point further, in the SSM, George practically never uses the word "evil", and when he does it's almost always as a discussion of the "good vs. evil" template that Tolkien's imitators focused on, and his point that very few people wake up and plan what evil they'll do today, or fail to see themselves as the heroes of their own stories, and the battle between good and evil is conducted in the human heart every single day. I mean, this is a nice, ASoIaF-focused reference:

Lifeboat's terrific. I mean, all of the named films are, but Lifeboat is great fun.

Apologies for the issues folks, we've got technical problems that we're trying to sort out with the help of our system admin. It may take awhile, it's a tough nut to crack.

Yeah, I did not undertand you meant the main site. That was a surprise!

Just fine, except trying to fix some stuff with the server move!

I'm not sure I follow. What "actual" westeros.org link? Can you post a screenshot at imgur.com?

Daemon said it in a public setting. Everyone "knows" because her servants gossip. Neither Barristan nor Sandor were the sort, or in position, to talk about it, and Janos Slynt was more interested in his rising up. I mean, his "betrayal" is obvious in the sense that he isn't arrested and remains on the small council, and later is sent off to arrange the Lannister-Tyrell alliance. But the precise role he played is, for one thing, largely unknown in part because his role in events leading up to it -- his playing the Starks -- is unknown. So he was just a loyal small council guy, like all the small council guys, and what's the gossip in that? Not everything that happens is learned by everybody. Littlefinger isn't some famous warrior, he didn't do anything especially remarkable, nor even necessary -- Ned was doomed whether Littlefinger pulled that knife from his belt or not -- so the fact that people who were busy butchering Ned Stark's men didn't feel it was worth talking about doesn't seem surprising. Now, if he'd cut down half a dozen of the Stark guards, Hound-style, I'm sure people would have heard of it. I don't know, nitpicking can be fun, but also it can just be tedious.

Okay, one other possibility is that your network or your computer has cached the old IP address of the forum, which should no longer work. This would be a DNS thing. Google offers this:

There are isolated reports so far of people having trouble getting in. From what I can tell, this may be related to old cache or cookies. To test that, if your browser has an incognito mode, use that to visit. If it works, then yes, clear your cache and westeros.org-related cookies, close and restart the browser, and it ought to work. If it doesn't, color me surprised, and reach out via contact@westeros.org, describing the issue you see, the device you're using, and the browser you are using.

Did you try incognito mode? Clear cache and so on? ETA: I've used Browserling to visit the site using a remote Mac with Sequoi (macOS 15) and Chrome, and had no problem. I suspect it's a cache or cookie issue on your side. Clear westeros.org-related cookies, clear westeros.org saved data/cache, close and restart the browser, and it ought to work.

Can you tell me more about the laptop and browser? Have you tried from an incognito window? I'm on desktop and it's not a problem, but it may be that you have cache or cookies in the way, and incognito should fix that.

That he had ambition was obvious enough, he went from a nobody to Master of Coin after a few short years. But that was seen as about his level by most, and in particular Tywin and Cersei -- the most likely to look down their nose at the smallest of small lord's -- didn't see his ambition as much to be concerned with.

I believe we have complete the migration (knock on wood). However, I will have to tune performance based on real traffic metrics to see what needs changing, so there may be intermittent restarts of Apache/PHP-FPM/etc. that may break things briefly if you are in the middle of loading the site or posting, so be cautious.

That's a problem for later. Though with the wealth Littlefinger had been accruing, would not be surprised if a Faceless Man did not find his way to Tywin's doorstep...

I'm sure he knew that was a risk, but I think he correctly assessed that Tywin would be too busy with dealing with piecing the realm back together to go launch a war over it.

I think the audience reads Littlefinger very differently than the characters do, because he is the "smallest of small lords" which algins with the prejudices that they have that we do not, is very useful in getting money, has a bit of a barbed wit and a decided willingness to be sycophant when needed. The way he presents himself to Eddard is probably not unlike how he presents himself to many people -- a little too sarcastic and "try hard" with his bon mots, but ultimately a helpful tool that's willing to lend his services. And then he stabs you in the back. The "whole court" was not present for Littlefinger betraying Ned, for that matter. The only groups present are named: Ned (dead), his guards (dead), the small council (not likely to blab, except Barristan, but also not too likely to blab since he makes a run for it), Joffrey, Cersei, the Hound, the Kingsguard, some Lannister guards, Slynt and the watch. And Littlefinger, of course. I don't think there'd be any clear gossip about what happened on that bloody day, as I imagine gold cloaks and Lannister guards would likelier talk about their own role than what some random small council member did. As to the betrothal of Alayne and Harold Hardyng, like a month and a half passes between the event and the death of Kevan Lannister, and it's not clear that the betrothal is even widely announced as I recall. The goings-on in the Vale hardly matter given everything else going on (like sellswords landing in the stormlands), and they don't have Varys to keep them informed any longer. Old blood people see him as just a lucky upjumped guy who has been useful, and they don't realize, most of them, that this has been a plan of his all along, a plan he has been working on for a long time to put himself in the position of benefiting from the chaos that he himself helped forment. And frankly, his being away to the Vale and secure in his power there is likely a hedge against pieces being put together. But it also probably furthers other aims he has.

I've seen them called voyeur thrillers in the trade websites like Variety.

I think RRR was fun in a bombastic way, but would not be on my top list for the year. Mileage does vary! Finished Duster. After a promising start, it became fairly mediocre, and ended with some conspiracy nonsense that doesn't really work because they completely failed to really sell it. Also, the promised car driving action that I had thought we'd get after the pilot kind of fizzled and was half-hearted. The Duster barely features as more than just getting Jim from point A to point B. If it gets a second season, I doubt I'll watch. Highlight of the show was Keith David as Ezra, though, so if you're a fan, just watching him can be fun.

The CuRicksous Case of Bethjamin Button (6th episode of season 8) had quite a wholesome sort of ending to the main plot (after much mayhem, of course).

Many years ago at Worldcon -- probably the Glasgow one in 2005 -- George was on a panel and talked about how one thing he didn't want to do was write about the clear-cut good and evil nature of things ala Tolkien (whom he is a huge fan of, note), and someone in the audience asked, more or less, well, what about the White Walkers? And to my recollection George basically indicated that there was more to be revealed regarding them and left it at that. I think it's clear he considers them something of an unobvious case. I assume with what we know twenty years later is that his intentions is that the causation for their existence and purpose is ... not mitigating, as such, but it's not just "evil for evil's sake".

I think Xray would be the one to talk to about anything officially BwB-related, but she hasn't been on the board for a couple of years so I think you'll want to reach out through FB about that

Duckman. I wonder if I can find it anywhere. Hell, Ren & Stimpy could get pretty dark, too... I don't know, man, the reality is that if a cartoon doesn't tell a story you want to watch, then it's not for you. Rick & Morty has carved out its niche and every season covers the kind of ground you'd expect.

Is only cartoon. Why you have to be mad?

A new use for AI today. Our local region boxer club was hosting its annual show. The judge was German, and we had an assistant ring secretary who would write down his critiques in German. We were going to use a new digital system..Unfortunately, the very old laptop (Windows 8-era) we had had not been tested on the system and its browser options could not use the site. So, they started the old fashioned way, hand-writing the critiques, while I tried to solve the problem. A second computer we had worked, but we had a backlog of critiques to put into the system by the time it was ready. So, I started trying to type them in, despite not knowing German... Not a success, very slow. And then I had a bright idea: I recall seeing people showing that ChatGPT was quite good at understanding handwriting, so what if... ? I'd photo the critiques, ChatGPT would spit out a very accurate transcription plus a corrected version (with explanatory notes) for minor grammar and spelling issues AND an English version so I could check and made sure it made sense. And that's how I ended up filling out nearly three dozen critiques. Entire process for each critique was barely two minutes each, and that's simply because I had to copy the transcription from my phone, send it to the PC, and copy and paste it over.

The people who are already obese are already obese. The process of fixing something that has developed over generations is going to take generations to fix long-term, but the people who need immediate help now ... well, they need it now, not a generation from now.