The So Spake Martin collection of reports and correspondence with GRRM have been updated with an e-mail from May in which a plot point from A Storm of Swords is briefly discussed, and with reports from last week from George’s appearance in San Diego last week. It includes some interesting information on the initial choice for the role of Illyrio Mopatis and how the dramatization of the series might effect GRRM’s depiction of characters.
The A Song of Ice and Fire forum now includes the Tapatalk plugin, which provides greatly improved readability and usability of the forum for users of mobile phones (iPhone, Blackberry, Nokia, and Android-based) who download the Tapatalk app. The plugin comes in a light, free version which allows reading but not posting, and a $2.99 version with posting and other features.
The regular mobile skin is still available, so the Tapatalk plugin is not nor ever will be mandatory for using the forum on a mobile platform.
As promised, the SSM collection has been updated with a C2E2 transcript and other reports. And as an extra surprise, we have the link to a brand new podcast interview with GRRM at the Dragon Page. GRRM shares some very frank and interesting thoughts on the process of writing the series and the difficulties and delays that have taken place with the last novel and the present one.
Over the past months, traffic to Westeros—both to the various website sections and the forums—has grown steadily, in no small part due to the buzz surrounding HBO’s Game of Thrones project. Given this, we thought it might be fun to take a little look at the various sections that make up the site and introduce them to both new and old visitors.
First up, Blood of Dragons MUSH, the reason that this site exists at all as all of Westeros was originally envisioned as a website with information for players of the MUSH. As it happened, the website grew so that the pages associated with the game became one section among several and the MUSH itself took longer than expected to complete. But in November 2006 it finally opened and the story has been unfolding ever since. Perhaps you want to be a part of it?
The So Spake Martin collection has been updated with a new audio interview with George R.R. Martin, carried out by Gamer’s Haven. As the name of the site might suggest, there’s a special focus on gaming in the interview, discussing GRRM’s history with games and their influence on his work.
Would you like to pay a visit to Westeros and take part in a pivotal historical event?
This weekend (Saturday 20th at 11 Central Time & Sunday 21st at 10 Central Time) the climax of king Daeron’s Conquest of Dorne will play out on Blood of Dragons MUSH. If you would like to join in, there is still time, as we have a selection of ready-made characters to get new players started almost instantly.
Continuing his fantastic series of colorful, whimsical maps inspired by the setting, Ice and Fire forum denizen Other-in-Law has added two new maps to his gallery: The stormlands and the jaw-droppingly detailed map of the Reach. Though speculative, the heraldry of the maps draws from the descriptions provided by GRRM for Westeros.org’s heraldry page as well as those described in the books.
These are some of the neatest bits of fan art we’ve ever seen for the series.
Patrick of Pat’s Fantasy Hot List has again selected the A Song of Ice and Fire forum as the best SF/F forum on the web. It’s always an honor and a pleasure for the community to receive such recognition. Our Literature sub-forum has attracted a host of insightful fans, well-read reviewers, and interesting authors over the years which has led to a good deal of interesting discussion.
Westeros has finally undergone a long-planned redesign, which brings a new, unified look to all of the various subsites. We hope our visitors will find it easier to navigate between the subsites as well as within the subsites. There’s still some polishing and finetuning left to do, so expect to see little changes here and there over the coming weeks, but most everything should work as intended.
Thanks to Narwen at Chronarda.ru, the Wiki of Ice and Fire, devoted to George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire, is now interwiki linked to Chronarda’s own wiki. As editors of both sites go through the pages, they can add a simple tag to easily link to English or Russian language versions of the webpages.
This increases the global fan community cooperation already present in the wikified “Ice and Fire” fan project, as the Wiki of Ice and Fire also shares interwiki linking with La Garde de Nuit, the French-language Ice and Fire fansite and associated wiki.
The A Song of Ice and Fire forum now has the option to use Facebook Connect to log in. For those who already have accounts, you can associate your forum account with Facebook via the following steps:
1) Open profile.
2) Click “Edit My Profile”.
3) Click “Manage Facebook Connect”
4) Follow instructions for how to use Facebook Connect to associate.
Once done, you can select to have your Facebook picture be used as your profile picture. Remember to Synchronize and then Save Changes.
It looks like our upgrade to Invision Power Board 3.0 is a success. However, the last maintenance step needed—rebuilding post content—is a very lengthy one, during which time the board will have to remain down. According to my calculations, it may take twelve hours before this process is done. Apologies for the inconvenience.
The forum will look very different for the time being once it’s up again, as we’ll be using the default skin. We’ll slowly develop the look back to something more unique, but this month is a busy one so it may take a good while.
To increase the intergration of the A Song of Ice and Fireforum with the rest of the myriad of Westeros.org sites, we’ve begun to make use of the RSS Import feature. This allows posts from our various blogs to be inserted into the forum as new topics. Presently, the feeds that are being imported are this present feed, Westeros.org Updates, into the Announcements forum; Game of Thrones (TV series site), into the General TV series forum; and Blood of Dragons Announcements, into the Blood of Dragons MUSH forum.
These imported blog posts can be responded to in threads, hopefully facilitating discussion and increasing awareness on the various topics Westeros.org keeps track of.
Following our dipping our toes into the water of social media over on Twitter, we now have a presence on Facebook’s Pages: Westeros. Become a fan and keep on top of the latest news on George R.R. Martin’s work, A Song of Ice and Fire, and HBO’s Game of Thrones adaption!
The A Song of Ice and Fire forum and the Wiki of Ice and Fire are up and running on our new server; response-times should generally be faster. Those who can’t get there just now need to wait for DNS information to propagate (which can take as much as 24 hours). If after that time you are still unable to reach the site, do please let us know via our e-mail address.