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 wrote about He-Man and the Masters of the Universe for Vorpalizer.

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.

I started writing about The NeverEnding Story for Vorpalizer and this weird emotional manifesto came out.

I’m excited to announce that I’ve made my debut at Wired, writing about recent developments in Grant Morrison & Chris Burnham’s Batman Incorporated #8. I tried to place the event in the context of Morrison’s run, and Morrison’s run in the context of the other things going on both with him and with Batman and DC Comics in recent years. Thanks to Laura Hudson for the opportunity.

And at Vorpalizer, I’ve written about Ron Howard’s Willow and the art and comics of Uno Moralez. Running the gamut!

I’ve been keeping pretty busy these days.

At Cool Practice, I wrote about “Missing You” by John Waite and the kinkiness of crystalline-sheen ’80s pop rock. This is the sound of my soul.

At Vorpalizer, I continued my series of posts on alt-genre webcomics with entries on SuperMutant Magic Academy by Jillian Tamaki and Forming by Jesse Moynihan. I also posted the second in a series on formative fantastic fiction, focusing on Taran Wanderer and the Prydain Chronicles by Lloyd Alexander.

And at Rolling Stone, I updated my list of the Dowager Countess’s best quotes from Downton Abbey Season Three with a few from the season finale.

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.

* Clive Barker revealed that he worked as a hustler through the publication of Weaveworld in 1987, in a Facebook conversation with the artist Dave McKean. By that point he’d published all six Books of Blood, The Damnation Game, and The Hellbound Heart. Barker is one of my very few heroes, a man who seems to have lived his life and pursued his art the way these things are meant to be done; I’m sad that he clearly remains so saddened by this secret part of his life.

* Julia Gfrörer is publishing a book version of her comic Black Is the Color through Fantagraphics and she posted a hugely impressive comic called “World Within the World” that feels like getting slapped in the face repeatedly.

* Somehow I’d managed not to read “Cody,” a story Michael DeForge serialized on one of his websites last autumn — it’s now all on one continuously scrolling page so there’s no excuse anymore. Turns out it’s a weird, funny, really precise and thoughtful exploration of subcultures and the sacrifices we make of parts of ourselves that are surplus to our chosen identities.

* Also, I somehow whiffed on the announcement that Koyama Press is putting out Michael DeForge’s collected short stories in a volume called Very Casual. It’s a very good time period for that kind of thing, with killer collections from Josh Simmons, Gabrielle Bell, Hans Rickheit, and Sammy Harkham coming out last year as well.

* Zak Smith devises a table of 100 random Tolkien/Jackson elements for your RPG needs. Listing these elements in this way does a few things. First, it’s funny. Second, its list-format-derived fantasy-potpourri feeling gives lie to the notion that Tolkien had a hemmed-in, orderly imagination that made its impact primarily through “realistic” worldbuilding. Third, it gives some shine to Jackson as an interpreter and remixer of Tolkien’s foundational work. Fourth, it demonstrates that both artists have a facility for conjuring very specific and unique emotional or tonal images arising from setting and/or character (eg. “a depressed warrior princess,” “magnificent fireworks”), to go with the genre-related images of creatures and plot points and so on (eg. “enormous, intelligent birds of prey,” “a horde of climbing goblins.”)

* Not unrelated: The Gygaxian lawful/neutral/chaotic//good/neutral/evil schematic for character alignment was some revolutionary ideological rebooting.

* Hellboy colorist Dave Stewart will be coloring Craig Thompson’s forthcoming all-ages graphic novel Space Dumplins. That will look nice.

* Speaking of the Mignolaverse, BPRD cowriters Mignola and Arcudi are doing an armored-supersoldier WWII period piece called Sledgehammer 44 with artist Jason Latour. I hadn’t even heard this was in the works.

* An all-too-rare new comic by Uno Moralez!

* And a less rare but still always welcome Moralez-assembled image/gif gallery!

* My collaborator Matt Rota’s art is getting to that “was this made by human hands?” point. Those pink fleshtones!

* Had to happen eventually: Jonny Negron and cocaine.

* Had to happen eventually: Jonny Negron and animated gifs.

* Had to happen eventually: Jonny Negron and full-color comics. Negron is inevitable.

* I can’t say enough good things about the elliptical fantasy one-pagers my collaborator William Cardini has been putting up lately. What an innovative marriage of format, genre, pacing, and effect.

* How lovely (and unexpected) have Zach Hazard Vaupen’s experiments with color been?

* Andy Burkholder, q v i e t.

* Renee French, “That nightmare goat.”

* This is some immaculate cartooning by Gabrielle Bell. There’s an intensity here I’ve never seen from her before, and her off-kilter way of spotting blacks is really cohering into a statement.

* Colleen Frakes goes dark.

* COOP draws Crowley.

* You’d be hard pressed to find better value for your illustration-enjoying dollar than a “Here’s all the stuff I drew in 2012” post by Hellen Jo.

* Tom Neely started a tumblr for his porn drawings. They’re gorrrrgeous. (They get much dirtier than the ones below.)

* On a not-dissimilar wavelength, I support these pieces by Garry Leach and John Romita Sr. and thank Benjamin Marra for posting them.

* Robin McConnell interviews Noel Freibert for Inkstuds. His work keeps getting better and white-hotter.

* Simon Hanselmann’s talented and funny enough that his comics have no need to be as raw and powerful as they are.

* I’d love to see Jillian Tamaki’s SuperMutant Magic Academy become the Achewood of the 20teens.

* Gore Verbinski, director of The Ring and The Pirates of the Caribbean, is adapting…Guy Delisle’s Pyongyang?

* Was Kylie Minogue the first person to make music that “sounded like Kylie,” or is there some antecedent of which I’m unaware? (Via Jamieson Cox.)

* I got a great deal out of BuzzFeed’s rundown of 16 great musical happenings from the past month — fine writing about fine music in a variety of styles. One of those things is “Full of Fire,” the 9-plus-minute new single by the Knife, which is relentlessly intense yet never ever aggravating. How they can keep you in that edge-of-panic listening state for that long across repeated listens is beyond me, but I’m glad they’re doing it. I’m glad they’ve constructed this aggressive industrial edifice at the heart of critical attention.

* Before I saw this video for “Heidi’s Head” by Kleenex I’m not sure I’d ever really internalized the way in which punk and post-punk were threatening to the existing rock paradigm, perhaps because I always loved them all equally. But man oh man is this ever the sound of a bunch of young people telling the dinosaurs “We don’t need you.” (Thanks, Douglas Wolk.)

* On the dinosaur side of the equation, I’ve been enjoying Steven Hyden’s “Winners’ History of Rock and Roll” series on enormously successful critic-proof rock bands. The link takes you to the opening installment, on Led Zeppelin, the second-greatest band of all time, isolating the Jimmy Page-concocted “sound” of how the band recorded itself as the key to its lasting success, which seems dead-on to me. He also tackles Kiss and Bon Jovi, the worst and second-worst bands of all time, and Aerosmith, who were very good through Pump and then stopped being good.

* Hey look it’s pictures of Kate Moss and Foxy Brown and Kate Winslet and Michelle Dockery Beyoncé and Beyoncé again and Beyoncé again and Dave Gahan and Rainer Andreeson, for your looking at pictures of attractive people needs.

* Drawings of criminal conduct are not criminal conduct. No one should go to prison for having drawings.

* “we are all responsible for the dialogue we foster, the culture we create, the criticism we enable; a few more hits aren’t worth it”—Tom Spurgeon. I’d forgotten about this quote of Tom’s before browsing some old tweets just now, but I was thinking of something very similar after the long-awaited new album by My Bloody Valentine was suddenly released this Saturday — I found myself preemptively dreading the smartest seen-it-all, above-it-all guy in the room quips I suspected I was bound to see about it online. I’m trying to adopt what my Catholic school teachers used to call “an attitude of gratitude.” With something like MBV and their landmark record Loveless, which is so special and singular, it comes down to acknowledging it as such, and not spraying a bunch of diarrhea into the discourse surrounding a beautiful unique thing or the people that made it. The same thing could probably be said about Beyoncé, a monumental talent who seems to draw out the worst and most dismissive parts of some people. I’ve had a tough run for a while now, and the art that moves me is important to me, and I’m trying to conduct myself in a way that respects that, and surround myself with other people who do the same.

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!