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My God in heaven, what has Don Lemon done to his face!?! He looks simultaneously decades older and younger. The cheeks of a boy below the eyes of a fifty year old. It's like a deepfake, only not...

It's remarkable, you managed to get almost all of that wrong

I’d expect supplies that can be stored, to be transported by sea, most likely from Pentos. So, salted meat, pickled fruits, honey, wine, and spirits. The GC doesn’t have any kind of bureaucracy to handle supplies, so they would depend purely upon foraging. Fresh items (ale, vegetables, bread, fodder for draught animals and cavalry horses), would have to be sourced locally. That will be a burden on the locals, but presumably, she will be arriving with a substantial military treasury. Paying for supplies would sweeten the pill, somewhat. IMHO, logistical constraints make a successful invasion of Westeros impossible, without the backing of local allies.

JRPGs= RPGS made by Japanese studios primarily marketed towards Japanese people. Let’s keep it simple rather than getting into mechanics

Alright then, I'm ready.

Turing and Voight Kampf tests

The Vale.

I'm not so sure about how successful that was, as a reader who was there, in so many ways, and who has always been friendly with Bill. He's really good at where he's not actually involved in so many ways. He likes that position - distance, big overview from afar that is about how we look now. But I was here, and have been ever since, and his writing didn't work for me with that. What those two events, Kennedys assassination and 9/11 had in common was the endless loops of what people didn't know -- just the image of what happened. A picture can be worth a thousand words, but I really and truly swear that endless 9/11 loop was superficial only, and not what it was for us. Then, well -- hey the response by Bush? to put up enormous billboards on the sides of high rises here downtown, where I lived, less than a mile above the Towers, which I knew well, had even worked in them, which told us to get credit cards and go shopping as the best way to counter and defeat the enemy? God I hated him and Cheney -- and still do.

I think its mostly a fait accompli now though. Not sure if you are from the US or not, but drivers licenses/IDs need to be 'RealID' compliant by next year which allows for facial biometric identification. In time it wont really matter if you have been staying off the grid, your face will be your ID (as mine apparently is now using Global Entry and by giving up my rights to privacy from the government by being a Fed). You don't really even need to link up a birth certificate or social security number, etc with it, if you've gotten on the wrong side of the law, there's nothing preventing the state from prosecuting John/Jane Doe with facial ID # xyz. Add to the fact that virtually everyone already keeps a personal tracking device on them nearly all the time (no insidious tracker chips needed) and I'd guess the age of anonymity is at an end. Given the way we've seen the youngest generation act towards social media, my guess is that in a hundred years, no one will blink an eye about it.

Right, a professional army which is dwindling by the day with a supply line that's had its pillar and stones cut out in more ways than one. It's also a supply line that Daenerys would be loath to reopen. Prepared ahead of time? Daenerys hasn't gotten a foot in the Dothraki let alone the Free Cities and they don't really get a foot in Westeros either. Size of the landmass? Most of that is the Dothraki Sea and the Red Waste, and we already know how much trouble Daenerys had with finding sustenance for a small group.

He has already become a cannibal through his direwolf. The next stage through the tree. He will feed on the blood of the sacrificial victims.

Queen Daenerys Targaryen will arrive in Westeros with a professional army and a large fleet of ships. They will be prepared ahead of time. The supply chain is easy because the Narrow Sea is short in distance. It won't be her army that will be starving for food. It will be the Westerosi who will be boiling their leather boots for soup. And the North will be eating each other before Daenerys arrives. The North will have resored to cannibalism by then. Food will be easier to procure from Essos because of the size of the landmass.

I think that William Gibson did a good job looking at the psychological fallout of 9/11 in Pattern Recognition, Spook Country, and Zero History. The event caused a kind of psychic dislocation in the American worldview that matches the Kennedy assassination in terms of modern critical historical faultlines.

So pissed at the Niners right now….two OTs they were linked to were both there when the Ravens picked immediately ahead of them. Ravens pick one of them. K, just take the other one. But NOPE! Instead let’s trade down a pick, let the Chiefs - the fucking Chiefs! - pick the OT, and draft a corner that could’ve been gotten at the end of the third round.

People tried and made a real mess of it. Particularly since it got started way too soon. Immediately in sf/f genre, for instance, many proposed the Fall of the Towers as the impetus for a plot in which somebody takes advantage to disappear and begin a new life ... w/o taking into account that even in ye olden days of 9/11 digital records were so extensive disappearing and creating a new identity was so difficult one needed deeply expensive and deep connections to do so -- and the government had them. So making it just personal romantic journey was ridiculous. Not to mention disparaging of the people who lost their lives and what their families went through. BTW, of such proposals for fiction I ever saw, not one was proposed by anyone who lives here and went through it. The weird politics of 9/11, though almost as forgotten as Katrina, are still playing out right this moment too, in so many ways. See -- for a single instance, Giuliani.

3. Assuming the Dothraki will want to come.

Fair warning, a man with 3 corners showing is up for anything

I also wouldn’t necessarily blame a guy for taking themselves out so as to not risk further injury if they are going to be going through the draft process in a couple months. So yeah, that one doesn’t bother me. Let alone - fuck Saban.

Yesterday, I picked some dandelions. This morning, I'm drinking dandelion tea. I've got a good mix of flowers and leaves, so the flavor isn't overly grassy.

I don't know if it's too recent for "history" but I've been re-reading Pynchon's The Bleeding Edge and it's a pretty remarkable timepiece for the cultural moments immediately preceding 9/11. The characterization of the internet at the time and American urban life of that era is portrayed accurately, hilariously, and tragically all at once. It was published in 2013 or 14, so clearly has the benefit of hindsight, but even ten/20 years later it doesn't feel aged or off-base. I'm honestly surprised we haven't seen more examination of 9/11 and the fallout from it in fiction and art in general.

Saban could be salty about that. Would be pretty telling if a man of his age and with the things he has accomplished to talk crap because he spurned you.

So then I thought of Pat Barker's The Women of Troy (2021), drawn from Euripides’s play, he Trojan Women, and Sophocles earlier play, Antigone, and its sequel, The Silence of the Girls (2018), which draws upon The Iliad Whereas I’ve not been interested by Barker's much praised, other consequences and aftermath of period war books, I was riveted by these two when they were published. Why? Evidently no matter what we know, or how we write, this Bronze Age legendarium of heroes, warriors and divinities, of 3000 B.C. -- 5000 years ago! -- stubbornly retain residual nimbi of glamor and glory. Despite reviewers, particularly very snooty academic (male) fellows, snobbishly informing readers that Barker hasn't a clue about the divine, or how important it is in the world view of everyone in the Bronze Age, as these women in her retellings, don't bow before either the divine or the (male) diviners. Ha!

I’m taking that one with a grain of salt. Mims was originally committed to play for Saban before switching to Georgia…

I had thought Dallas was in his future, we got Guyton instead, similar size and experience. The only thing I'd be scared of is the Saban thing. Saban hinted that he is a soft player, that he took himself out of the SEC championship game because his ankle was sore. Not a red flag but definitely something to think about.

Thanks for the tip!