Can it be true???

I snark about Cracked.com's photoplasty contests a lot, because most of them are crap.

This, on the other hand, is the greatest thing I've seen on the internet* all week.

*Well, at least among the sites I'm going to cop to visiting.

Also: Not mentioned: Hanoi Jane as Nancy Reagan. Doubleyou. Tee. Eff.

A review of Divergent based solely on its trailer

Bahahahhaahahhaahahhahaahahhaahhaha


Oh wait this is a real movie.

Yikes.

The end.

Some random statistics about POV in A Song of Ice and Fire

I used the wiki to assemble some random facts about POV in this series. Enjoy.

Note: this does not include the sample chapters from The Winds of Winter that GRRM has either posted online or read at conventions.

• Tyrion Lannister is the king of POV with 47 chapters. Jon Snow has 42. Eighteen characters - Wil, Cressen, Chett, Merrett Frey, Pate, Brienne of Tarth, Asha Greyjoy, Victarion Greyjoy, Aeron Greyjoy, Areo Hotah, Arys Oakheart, Arianne Martell, Quentyn Martell, Ser Barristan, Jon Connington, Melisandre, Varamyr Sixskins, and Kevan Lannister - have 41 chapters combined. 
• Despite the fact that she died in the third book, Catelyn Stark has more POV chapters (25) than any other character except Tyrion, Jon, Arya (33) and Daenerys (31).
• Catelyn also has more POV chapters than the entire Greyjoy family put together (23).
• With fifteen chapters in A Game of Thrones, Ned Stark is tied with Tyrion (15 in Clash) for most POV chapters in a single volume.
• Arya has five chapters in A Game of Thrones and Daenerys 10. These numbers are reversed for the second book.
• With 17 chapters, Jaime Lannister has more chapters than any other character who did not have chapters in the first book.
• Theon Greyjoy and Davos Seaworth both became POV characters in A Clash of Kings. To date, they both have had 13 POV chapters.
• 118 of the 344 chapters belong to members of House Stark. That's 4 more than Houses Lannister and Targaryen combined. (And that's counting both Ser Barristan and Jon Connington as Targaryen POVs.)
• Despite being a "minor" POV character, Ser Barristan has more chapters (4) in his first book than Davos did (3).
• Of the 31 POV characters in the series, 10 are dead (including Catelyn, but not including any of the Dance cliffhangers). They account for 48 of the 344 chapters. If we expand the "dead" category to include cliffhangers and theories (or to put it another way, Jon, Brienne and Melisandre), it becomes 13 characters and 99 chapters. Either way, there are at least eighteen POV characters still alive.
• There are six POV characters whose first names start with the letter "A." All but one of them (Asha) have an "r" in their first name as well.
• Thanks largely to Jon Snow, the Night's Watch has more chapters than Houses Baratheon, Martell and Greyjoy combined.
• Daenerys is the only Royal POV character. None of the Five Kings or their successors are POV characters.
• A Game of Thrones averages 8.1 chapters per character. As the character count increases, this number decreases. A Feast For Crows averages 3.5 chapters per character. Despite having more characters, A Dance With Dragons reverses this trend with an average of 4.1 chapters per character.
• A Feast For Crows has only 46 chapters. No other book has fewer than 70.

Time for more photosnark

Cracked has another photoplasty contest, and that can only mean one thing.

Oh, joy. The topic is: "Images from the Inevitable Future of Celebrity Culture."

#21: We see a number of pictures and busts people with no talent but the ability to win national popularity contests in a room. Obama is represented by a lifelike statue for some reason.

#20: ...I might barf a little bit. There are probably people who would watch that.

#16: Is that what I think it is?  Yikes. Also eew.

#15: Wait, you mean there's not a Church of Hollywood already?  "Thou shalt not kill, except if the victim is an evil white male." "Thou shalt not keep and bear arms, but thou shalt pay through the nose to watch others use them in unbelievable situations." "Thou shalt not torrent."

#13: Welcome to Japan.

#12: Um. The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame is already a pretty obnoxious endorsement of celebrity culture. But yeah, take it up to 11 (see what I did there?) and make it totally tasteless.

#9: Congratulations. You have just raped my childhood more than the thought of handing Star Wars over to the guy who gave us the vapid Star Trek Into Darkness ever could. F*ck you.

#7: By the way: my children (in the horrific event that I ever breed) will never be allowed to date anyone named after a fictional character.

Well, those are the only ones worth commenting on. Until next time, I'm your host of hatred and snark.

And now, a word on the Blaze Bayley albums

They suck.

It's not just that Blaze is a god-awful singer (he is - I can count on one hand the number of songs where he doesn't flub a note), but the songs themselves just aren't good.  Hell, the average Iron Maiden fan is going to pick up No Prayer for the Dying and Fear of the Dark before getting to the X albums, and, well, it's a sign of what's to come. 

What's the best song on Somewhere in Time? Okay, I'll grant you, "Alexander the Great" is pretty awesome, but realistically, it's Adrian Smith's "Wasted Years."  Best song on Seventh Son of a Seventh Son is either "Can I Play With Madness" or "The Evil That Men Do," both of which were co-written by Smith.  Without his contributions to No Prayer and Dark, you're left with "Fear of the Dark" itself.  And even that creative spark seems to be gone on both Blaze albums.  You've got "The Clansman" and that's about it.  "Sign of the Cross" is decent (when you've got someone who can sing "Croooooooooooooooooooooooss" without being horribly flat), and Dickinson's decision to jump up an entire octave for the chorus of "Lord of the Flies" in this live version makes that song acceptable.

Without that, it's an extremely pedestrian song. 

And that's all.

Farscape: I, E.T. (and Premiere notes)

I'm not doing a full review of the Premiere because SF Debris already did, and, well, I try to not overlap with SF Debris's reviews for the same reason I haven't reviewed The Phantom Menace. Not because it's been done to death, but because those guys have video and I do not, and basically say everything I want to say.

(And no, the sudden dive into another "old" sci-fi TV show does not mean I'm abandoning either B5 or A Game of Thrones. My B5 reviews are on hold until I have time to go back and re-watch some early S3 episodes, because I feel like I missed something. A Game of Thrones read/blog continues this weekend; I haven't been keeping up with that because I have to finish The Screwtape Letters for a book club meeting.

So. Just a few notes on "Premiere" and then on to "I, E.T."

Defense: Season 3 should have stopped where it did

See this post for the opposing view, yes this reply is late, and yes there will be SPLOILERS!

Best comment on the internet today

as found on r/starcraft

By the way, I'm not at all surprised that he got constantly supply-blocked. All a zerg has to do to deal with supply-block is go 1svvvv, problem solved. No clicking, no looking back at the base, done. I recently switched from zerg to protoss (nowhere near GM, thanks for asking), and found supply-blocks to be far and away my biggest problem.

Prosecution: Should Season 3 have stopped where it did?

Tune in tomorrow for the Case for the Defense. Naturally, there will be massive spoilers for Season 4 of Game of Thrones.

Addendum to my Yunkai/io9 rant

Two things I missed. One, the author's tag at the bottom indicates he's a stand-up comedian. I don't know if the rant was satire or not. It was neither funny nor a serious critique.

Two, I should explain my "This. Is. Deliberate." comment a bit more. So that's what most of this post is going to be.

When I read, I'm colorblind. Normally a character's skin tone gets mentioned about once, and then that's it. If there's something important about a character's description - say, golden hair - I'm more likely to remember it. How brown is Arianne Martell? I can't remember off the top of my head, and I'm one of the people who likes the Dorne plot. So to me, when I read fairly late in A Storm of Swords that Astapor and Yunkai both went to pot after Dany's revolutions there, my first thought was less "Iraq or Afghanistan" (the novel was published in 2000), and more "The French Revolution." Which, by the way, had a bunch of white people in it.

Now, because a bunch of intellectuals going potty over an unequal class system and losing some heads is basically Occupy Wall Street's wet dream, we're probably going to see more "War on Terror" and less "French Revolution" in the show. (Although again, I'd like to point out: the show equates homosexuality and incest pretty much every opportunity it gets. So either it's hyper-liberal or it's fairly conservative.) Which in turn means that, because the TV audience is stupid and doesn't understand metaphor unless it dances naked in front of them while singing "I am the Walrus," the "liberated" folk have to be brown.

TLDR: Read the frakking books and you'll see what they're doing and why.

What do I mean by "the TV audience is stupid?" Read on.

The most f&cking idiotic thing I've read on io9 in a while

Now, look. Io9 is one of those sites I find myself visiting pretty often despite the fact that its obnoxious liberalism rears its head on a semi-regular basis. They write mostly good stuff about a lot of things that are relevant to me as a sci-fi nerd, but every once in a while they post something so utterly f&cking stupid that I wonder what the hell I'm doing on that site.

Case in point: an article posted today (appropriately tagged as a "Rant") entitled "Daenerys' whole storyline on Game of Thrones is messed up." It's messed up because it's about a white girl going around saving POCs from their own backwards societies. In doing so, Daenerys paradoxically becomes "a liberal white woman who goes around saving and civilising [sic] brown people" in a story that is "at its heart, a neocon wet dream." Got it? A liberal living out a neocon dream.

But let's cut through the semantic gobbledygook (can I still say "gobbledygook?") and get right down to the bone the author wants to pick.