The latest episode of my Game of Thrones/A Song of Ice and Fire podcast is up. This week my co-host Stefan Sasse and I talk about three powerful women of Westeros: Margaery Tyrell, Melisandre of Asshai, and Lysa Arryn. Enjoy!

When you look at Theon’s situation, where do you come down on what he wound up doing? Do you find fault with it? Aside from the child-murdering, of course, which I’d hope you do.

I would say that the worse thing he does is the kids, yeah, but I definitely think he’s just trying to prove himself in a really fucked-up way. With the child-murdering … I’ll be honest with you, mate. When I was shooting it, I had a bit of a problem. There’s this look of regret that I gave when the bodies of the two children bodies get raised on the ropes. I look torn about it. And I always thought Theon would just enjoy playing the trick on the whole village. That’s how I would’ve liked to have played it. Then we sat down with David and Dan and [director] David Nutter and decided that there needed to be some sort of regret there, to make it morally correct. But I always thought for Theon that he would just sort of enjoy playing the trick on Winterfell.

I interviewed Alfie Allen about playing Theon Greyjoy in Game of Thrones for Rolling Stone. It got kind of dark.

Started strong, ended strong, maybe a little shaky in the middle but who cares: I reviewed tonight’s episode of Game of Thrones for Rolling Stone.

[NIKOLAJ COSTER-WALDAU:] The thing that I love about all these things that happen – some of these really horrible incidents – is that the characters actually are really truthful. I can totally understand why Locke gets so angry with Jaime. I mean, I don’t know anything worse than when I meet someone who has a sense of entitlement just because of who they are – “Hey, I’m famous, so I should be treated differently.” When you meet people like that, you just want to punch them. And that’s exactly what Locke does. Granted, he takes it to an extreme because he’s also a bit of a psycho, but I think you still understand where he comes from.

Same with some of the things that Jamie says to other characters, like Brienne. They’re very hurtful, but most of the time he actually comes from a coarse truth, which makes it bite so much harder.

[ROLLING STONE:] That’s what was devastating about what happened to Jaime: For the first time we see him perform a truly selfless act, putting himself on the line to save Brienne from Locke and his men, and he’s immediately punished for it.

[Laughs] I know, I know. Now, what if the question was put to Jamie – “You can either save this lady or you can save your hand.” I’m pretty sure he would save his hand, I’m sorry to say. Maybe losing his hand will make him answer that question in a different way later on in his life. For him as a character, for him as a person, I think, he needs to lose that hand.

I interviewed Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, aka Jaime Lannister, aka the Kingslayer, about Game of Thrones for Rolling Stone.

I reviewed tonight’s intricate and nasty little episode of Game of Thrones for Rolling Stone. I thought they handled that final sequence awfully well.

I interviewed Sophie Turner about playing Sansa Stark on Game of Thrones for Rolling Stone. She’s terrific in the role and very very smart about the character, who’s become maybe my single favorite in the series.

My review of tonight’s episode of Game of Thrones is up at Rolling Stone. I talk a little bit about how one might endeavor to pick up Wayne LaPierre, were one so inclined.

I wrote this morning’s top story at Wired.com: “The New Spoiler Culture: Game of Thrones and the Fight to Live Uninformed.” I spoke with critics Alyssa Rosenberg, Alan Sepinwall, and Maureen Ryan, and fansite honchos Elio García Jr. of Westeros, Phil Bicking of Winter Is Coming, and John Jasmin of Tower of the Hand [plus Mindset from the wonderful tumblr Nobody Suspects the Butterfly, though that ended up on the cutting room floor 🙁 ] about the complex interplay of books, show, DVRs, DVDs, streaming, readers vs. non-readers, social media, forums, Tumblr, Twitter, etc etc in keeping people free of information they don’t want to know about a given work of fiction. Thanks very much to editor Laura Hudson for making it happen.

How great is that banner image, by the way?

I interviewed Game of Thrones‘ Lady Margaery, Natalie Dormer, about playing “the Kate Middleton of Westeros” for Rolling Stone. I came away very, very impressed by the amount of thought she’d clearly put into this character. She had every angle covered.

My review of tonight’s premiere is up at Rolling Stone. I compare Joffrey to a Bichon Frisé on its way to the veterinarian to get its anal glands expressed, so there’s that.

I wrote a quick and dirty guide to some of the new faces popping up on Game of Thrones this season for Rolling Stone. A special shout-out to Mance Rayder, the Star Warsiest name in the entire series.

If the plot of Game of Thrones were a Facebook relationship status, it’d be, “It’s complicated.” Over at Rolling Stone I whipped up a guide to the show’s first two seasons that should get you all caught up in time for the premiere.

Without spoiling anything, I’ll say that I’ve seen the first four episodes, and as a whole I like them better than the first four episodes of seasons one and two.

I’m back on the Game of Thrones beat for Rolling Stone this season, and to kick things off I interviewed screenwriter, Executive Story Editor, mythos guru, and friend of BoiledLeather.com Bryan Cogman about the process of adapting A Storm of Swords (and other books (? (!) ) ) into Season Three of the show.

The new episode of the Boiled Leather Audio Hour, my A Song of Ice and Fire podcast, is up! This time out, my co-host Stefan Sasse and I continue our series on the books’ female characters, focusing on Catelyn Stark and Daenerys Targaryen.

The Great Council has convened! This week, my Boiled Leather Audio Hour cohost Stefan Sasse and I are the special guests on the mother of all ASoIaF podcasts, A Podcast of Ice and Fire. The explicit goal was for me and Stefan and APoIaF cohosts Amin, Ashley, and Kyle to let our collective hair down; mission accomplished. We get into some high-grade nerdery: a bunch of “who’d win in a fight”s, picking our ideal Small Council and Kingsguard (well, someone’s ideal, anyway), the pros and cons of Tumblr as a platform and a fandom, our biggest controversies…and, naturally, a spirited co-ed game of “how much sex would you have with this character,” guest starring Elio & Linda from Westeros. We all had a great time and I think it shows.

I’ve been listening to A Podcast of Ice and Fire since the earliest days of my fandom. I’ve hoped to be invited on with a fervency you’d find unbecoming, and not just because they’re all, like, really hot. (I’m not the only person who sits and reloads podcastoficeandfire.com for the rotating “Current Hosts” photo eye-candy buffet, am I? Amin, put some more pictures in there, you handsome devil.) Thank you to Amin, Ashley, and Kyle for having us; hopefully we’ll get to “meet” Mimi on a future episode.

My comrade Stefan Sasse and I have posted a new episode of our A Song of Ice and Fire podcast the Boiled Leather Audio Hour, focused on the latest preview chapter George R.R. Martin has released from The Winds of Winter. Get your Dorne on!

* Tom Spurgeon’s complete holiday interview series is up at the Comics Reporter. Go ye and click; so far I’ve really enjoyed the interviews with writer Mark Waid, cartoonists Dean Haspiel, Derf Backderf, Sammy Harkham, and Tom Kaczynski, and critics J. Caleb Mozzocco and Rob Clough.

* You should absolutely read “Sticky-Icky-Icky,” a stoner-sex-slice-of-life comic by Box Brown. I said “whoa” when I saw this page in particular.

* Ooh, it’s a master list of the tumblrs for all the members of Closed Caption Comics who have tumblrs. Thanks, Ryan Cecil Smith!

* Wow, the colors on this cover for Lisa Hanawalt’s forthcoming book from Drawn & Quarterly.

* Always glad to see smut from Julia Gfrörer.

* Very very Barkerian work from Mr. Freibert.

* This painting by Charles-Frédéric Soehnée is a nightmare. (Via Monster Brains.)

* Just for fun, Dresden Kodak creator is doing a whole series of drawings and sketches and posts on J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Silmarillion. Many of them are idiosyncratic and beautiful.

* The addendum at the end hurts a bit because Coates in scold mode is the worst Coates, but otherwise this is a nice scales-from-the-eyes piece by Ta-Nehisi Coates about Kendrick Lamar’s excellent album Good Kid, M.A.A.D. City.

* Here are all of Chris “Shallow Rewards” Ott’s posts on the Cure from his stint on the themed music blog One Week, One Band last year. If you want to read a good writer write a whole lot about a good band he happens to love, then this is just like heaven . (Just note that in this case, when you’re clicking the arrows to navigate the pages, “older” actually means “newer,” since it’s arranged chronologically but tumblr gets confused by this.)

* Great piece on Downton Abbey and Lady Edith by Alyssa Rosenberg.

* John Brennan belongs in prison, not running the CIA. If you did half the shit this guy says it’s okay for the government to do, you bet your ass you’d be in prison.

* Truth, justice, and the American way.

* Very sad news: Wilko Johnson, guitarist for Dr. Feelgood and Ser Ilyn Payne on Game of Thrones, is dying of pancreatic cancer. Man that guy played with style.

* Scientists have filmed a live giant squid in its natural habitat. I can die now.

* New The Winds of Winter sample chapter from George R.R. Martin!

The latest episode of The Boiled Leather Audio Hour, the podcast about Game of Thrones/A Song of Ice and Fire that I do with Stefan Sasse, is up. In this one we review a pair of recent books about the series, The Lands of Ice and Fire (a collection of maps) and A Flight of Sorrows (a collection of essays), just in time to buy them, or not, for the fantasy fan on your list. Servicey!

My pal Stefan Sasse and I are back in the podcasting saddle with The Boiled Leather Audio Hour Episode 15. In this installment of our A Song of Ice and Fire/Game of Thrones podcast we take a look at two prominent anomalies among that world’s women, Brienne of Tarth and Asha Greyjoy.

These are pure joy to record. I hope you like listening to them!

Over at my A Song of Ice and Fire site I wrote about The Lands of Ice and Fire, a collection of maps of the Game of Thrones world, and what those maps tell us about what George R.R. Martin is really writing about.