Westeros

(UPDATE:

James Hibberd at EW seems to have been thinking along the same lines, and has learned from a network representative that they’ve never had a piece of online promotional content generate so many hits (now standing at some 3.5 million) in so short a time. Amazing.)

The eager fans of HBO’s hit series who flocked to the “Shadows” teaser is quite amazing. A day and a half since it premiered, and Youtube presently reports that it’s been viewed no less than 2,296,806 times. That’s… well, a lot! The intensity of anticipation among fans of the series is growing as we’re about two hit just two months away from the premiere on April 1st (April 2nd in the UK and Central Europe).

In fact, the numbers suggest that the show has been steadily climbing all around, not just in the perception of the fandom on the internet.

We had an inkling of this awhile back, but now it’s official: an enhanced e-book of A Game of Thrones has come out from the UK’s Harper Collins Voyager, containing some really cool features that add to the experience such as a glossary of characters, a dynamic map tracking characters’ movements from chapter to chapter (note: the web-accessible version seems buggy, but one assumes it’s working just fine in the app), and exclusive audio clips from the audio book read by Roy Dotrice (who received a Guiness Book of World Records entry for most voices by an individual in a single audio book).

The e-book is an iOS exclusive, at least at this time, and is sold only from the UK bookstore.

Here’s the full details:

Although the ensemble cast of Game of Thrones struck out for “Outstanding Performance by an Ensemble in a Dramatic Series”—losing to sibling Boardwalk Empire, who had taken the award last year—it was not all for naught for the show. Earlier in the day, it was announced on the red carpet that the show took the award for “Outstanding Perfomance by a Stunt Ensemble in a Television Series”, which is certainly well-deserved when you consider how many stunts went into the series. Congratulations all around to the stunt team! Full results can be found at the Screen Actors Guild Awards page.

The nice thing about the ensemble being nominated, it must be said, is the fact that so many of the actors—especially the younger actors—turned up at the award ceremony. Here’s a recap of who was there:

• Kit Harrington was there, and was even featured in a red carpet interview.
• Emilia Clarke looked lovely in a Chanel dress from the Fall 2012 collection. There’s even a poll about the look and what fans thought of it.
• Alfie Allen looked relaxed with his open collar.
• Nikolaj Coster-Waldau was on hand, too!
• Jason Momoa and wife Lisa Bonet were there as well, and were glimpsed on camera… but it doesn’t look as if they managed a red carpet photo. From what we’ve read from one of HBO’s publicity people, the photo line was quite horrendous and many actors chose to skip it.

That video had a lot of new images, didn’t it? Some excellent material for consideration and discussion, and to help that along, we’ve posted screencaps to our Previews gallery, beginning with this first look at Dragonstone. It goes on for 45 more images, giving us added looks at Brienne of Tarth, Xaro Xhoan Daxos, and even Pyat Pree. There’s one image I failed to capture, of Catelyn, but we’ll be adding that tomorrow. Today… well, it’s 5 AM and bed is calling. Enjoy!

And here it is!

Screen caps can be found here, beginning with this image at Dragonstone.

Over at “Not a Blog”, GRRM has been making recommendations for this year’s Hugo Awards—the oldest and most well-known award for science fiction and fantasy—in various categories. His own work, A Dance with Dragons, is eligible for the Best Novel category, and of course Game of Thrones is eligible in the Dramatic Presentation, Short Form category… but, intriguingly, it’s also eligible for the Dramatic Presentation, Long Form category. There’s some interesting discussion on that topic in comments.

The take out? I’d say fans of the show who nominate should all nominate it in the Long Form category, and maybe not vote for it at all in Short Form (a category which will, with 99.99% certainty, be won by the Doctor Who episode “The Doctor’s Wife”, written by Neil Gaiman) so that the administrators have an easy choice to make as to category. It worked back in 2008 when fans nominated Heroes in Long Form and almost no votes were thrown in for Short Form. That’s what we intend to do, in any case, having gotten a supporting membership of our own.

All members of last year’s Worldcon, and current members of this year’s Worldcon at Chicon in Chicago provided they get their membership—any membership, even the $50 Supporting membership, which has a number of perks such as receiving e-books of all the finalist novels - on or before January 31st), can nominate. And you should do. And if you can actually attend the event, even better—five days of SF/F/H goodness, academic tracks and film tracks, parties and meeting many of the luminaries of the genre past, present, and future, parties, art dealers and memorabilia and books upon books, parties…

Did I mention the parties? The Brotherhood without Banner will be making a strong showing, and their parties are famous. And of course, George will be there, and as he always says, a con’s the absolute best setting to see him, not just at signings and readings, but also on panels and, yes, in the party rooms.

While you’re counting the hours and minutes to Sunday evening’s premiere of a new trailer with fresh footage from the upcoming season 2, The Hollywood Reporter takes us back to Season 1 with this long, 5 minute behind-the-scenes footage from HBO’s forthcoming DVD (US, UK) and Bluray (US, UK) box sets. This video features Emilia Clarke as Daenerys, as well as director Daniel Minahan and executive producers David Benioff and Dan Weiss, as they discuss the infamous heart-eating scene:

Straight from the horse’s mouth:

Mark your calendars, folks. And for those who are True Blood fans, HBO also says there’ll be a “short graphic tease” for season 5 of that show at 8:58 PM.

Over at his “Not a Blog”, GRRM has posted details of a book sale he’s holding through to the Super Bowl, in honor of his beloved New York Giants making an appearance there.

In brief:

• $10 off hardcovers
• $20 off limited editions

And to quote instructions:

As always, GRRM’s happy to personalize inscriptions on books sold through his official website. (At a guess, that GO GIANTS requirement may make this a non-starter for Pats fans…)

Ian Ruhfass, a lead 3D Artist at A52/Elastic, popped over to Reddit to share the fact that he’s worked on the Emmy-winning title sequence, and that he’s been working on the title sequence for season 2. He’s coy with details, but yes, there’ll be some new locations featured in the title this season… and one of them sure sounds like it’ll be Harrenhal, which is to be expected.

He goes on to discuss his work more generally, and offers some good advice for budding 3D artists. Well worth checking out.

Via Czech fan site Ice & Fire, it seems that HBO Central Europe has confirmed that they’re repeating what they did last year: the second season of Game of Thrones will air the day after it premieres in the United States, meaning April 2nd for a broad swath of Central Europe. They join Sky Atlantic as being offer next-day airing of the show, eased in great part by being part of the HBO corporate umbrella. Whether any other broadcasters or cable companies will be able to provide the same service in Europe remains to be seen.

Thanks to Indigo Books, we’ve learned that George R.R. Martin will be speaking and signing books at the Indigo store at 55 Bloor Street West, at 7 PM on March 13th. Great opportunity for Canadian fans to meet GRRM. This appearance hasn’t apparently made it onto his Appearances page just yet, so it must have been recently finalized.

And we’ll just mention that his official page is a great way to see where he’ll be in coming months. Trips planned for this year include London in April for Eastercon, as well as such varied places as Portugal, Montana, Seattle, and Spain.

Subtext, makers of the iPad free social reading app of the same name, have launched a completely overhauled version of their application. The UI is sleeker and more informative, a brand new book search tool has been set, and more.

Last summer, Subtext invited me to be one of three “experts”—joined by series editor Anne Groell (who’s also our editor on The World of Ice and Fire)  and Sean T. Collins of Boiled Leather)—to add notes to A Game of Thrones. It was a fun, interesting project, and we amassed something north of 1,000 notes covering the sublime (Sean’s entries are particularly thought-provoking) to the amusing (Anne has some good stories about the behind-the-scenes) to the trivial (well, that’d be my entries, filled with little facts and heraldry and quotes direct from GRRM). The feedback has been quite positive, I’ve been told.

A growing range of books are supported by the app, so that readers, experts, and writers can comment on and communicate with one another about the books they’re reading. It’s a fantastic way to bring books even further into the 21st century, by making them social. Want to argue why a character made a bad choice on page 633? Want to respond to an editor’s funny story about how the author worked his way to writing a particular scene as she did? Want to take argue with someone else’s gloss of the text? You can do all of that with the Subtext app. Or how about embed videos or images that you associate with particular characters, scenes, or events? You can do that, as well.

Books can be imported from various sources, or bought through the Google Books store, and there are nice, clear instructions for how to do it in the app. I believe an Android version is in development, so for now it’s just for iPad, and available only via the siTunes US store. If youv’e an iPad, I really recommend checking it out—I believe there’s a few 50 page previews, with the notes, so you can see what each book they have has to offer.

Kotaku, the gaming-focused site that’s part of the Gawker Media empire, has an excellent write-up for A Game of Thrones: The Board Game (Amazon: US, UK) from Fantasy Flight Games.

As the review indicates, it really is a fantastic game—runs a bit long and works best with a full complement of players, and the rules take some learning, but once you have it down, it’s extremely good. So good, that it’s just shy of the top 100 at BoardGameGeek, which ranks something like 5,000 board games. The new 2nd edition is said to be particularly good, bringing in rules from past expansions and marrying them to beautiful art and graphic design. If you’re a fan of deep, strategic board games, the Game of Thrones board game is a terrific choice.

This is almost the most we’ve heard from any of the new cast members, and it’s certainly interesting. In this interview with Blackfilm, actor Nonso Anozie—cast in the role of Xaro Xhoan Daxos—spills some details about his role, his familiarity with the books, and his experience working on the show

Thanks to HBO getting the Art Direction video up on Youtube the day after it was released on HBO.com, we have screenshots of notable bits, with commentary on details.

Featuring the most extensive glimpses we’ve had of Qarth and Harrenhal to date, the screenshots begin here, with what’s also the most spoilery image in the whole thing. Tread carefully!

Thanks to Blastr for bringing this IGN interview with Steve DeKnight, executive producer and writer of Starz’s Spartacus series, we learn that the writing staff of Spartacus are all big fans of HBO’s Game of Thrones while he explains why a certain storyline they had planned for the new season fell by the way side:

Another day, another guild award nomination! This time, according to Deadline Hollywood, the Costumer Designers Guild has announced its nominees, and Game of Thrones‘s Michele Clapton is included in the Outstanding Period/Fantasy Television category. We suspect there’ll be stiff competition from Showtime’s The Borgias (costumes by Gabriella Pescucci) and fellow HBO show Boardwalk Empire (John A. Dunn, Lisa Padovani), to say the least.

HBO’s gone ahead and released another video, first via the HBO app for iOS and Android, and that so shortly after the Croatia video hit the air. This one, focused on art direction, gives us some of our best looks at sets such as Harrenhal, Qarth, and Craster’s Keep. There’s a couple of seconds of kind of spoilerish material, as well, so if you haven’t read A Clash of Kings, you may not want to watch.

Screencaps and the usual commentary when the video hits the official Game of Thrones channel and we can get a hold of 720p images.

Valyrian Steel has announced that pre-ordering of the Night’s Watch Dragonglass Dagger Set—also known as the “Beyond the Wall Survival Kit”—will begin from this Saturday.

This is one of the coolest things they’ve done in their line of officially-licensed “A Song of Ice and Fire” replicas—including Longclaw, Needle, and Ice, as well as the forthcoming King Robert’s Hammer (also available for pre-order)—and features a real obsidian blade crafted by hand (no two weapons will be exactly alike!), a belt pouch, five obsidian arrowheads, a sheath, and a collectible wooden storage box.

Bear in mind that there may be some restrictions depending on where you live, so read the details carefully at their site.

The David Gemmell Legend Award is a U.K.-based award for fantasy, divided into several categories according to the sub-genre. Presently, the Legend Award has opened up its polls to determine the short lists, and in the Legend category for Best Fantasy Novel of 2011?

You guessed it: A Dance with Dragons by George R.R. Martin, along with many other books besides. The polls close on March 31st, and then voting will open to determine the final winners in each of three categories. To vote, visit the poll (and make sure to check the radio button above the title you want to support).

Some new photos from the filming in Iceland in November and December have turned up, courtesy of the Location Guide—a site specializing in covering and promoting foreign locations for film and television purposes—and Pegaus Productions, the local production company that faciliated the filming.

Among the notable production details: 200 crew and 15 horses, minimal need for building anything, and snowfall was needed to minimize costs (a lack of snow would have meant they’d have to film on the glacier itself, which would take longer and be more expensive, and would also have revealed ash from a recent volcanic eruption).

We should note that at least one of the images is potentially a spoiler if you’ve not read A Clash of Kings, so if you don’t want to be spoiled… well, don’t look!

In their round-up of their plans for 2012, roleplaying game publisher Green Ronin spend a good deal of time discussing their Song of Ice and Fire Roleplaying game. The huge boom in interest in all things Ice and Fire thanks to HBO’s Game of Thrones has seriously depleted their stock of the Song of Ice and Fire Roleplaying rule book. Instead of reprinting it, they’re announcing a brand new edition, called the A Game of Thrones edition, which will include the entirety of the Peril of King’s Landing adventure that was separately released.

Besides being full color, the RPG will feature a brand new cover from the amazing Michael Komarck, whose provided some of the finest artwork for “A Song of Ice and Fire” to date. Green Ronin’s plans extend past that May release of the AGoT edition, however.

We’ve updated our gallery with images from the last two videos, with the usual commentary drawing from the books and from other, relevant information. But in the course of watching the Croatia video, a new bit of information slipped out.

To the right you can see director Alan Taylor, who directed “Baelor” and “Fire and Blood”, and whom we recently confirmed was directing four of the ten episodes…

... and something new: he’s now a co-executive producer on Game of Thrones!

An interesting revelation. This puts him on the same footing as GRRM, as far as “official” credits go, and suggests two things to us: if there are further seasons, he’s going to be leaving a major mark as a director in them (bearing in mind that he’ll certainly be busy this summer, when shooting on Thor 2 starts), and that he’ll have a good deal of input on the directiorial aspects of the show. His extensive experience as a director should be a boon for the production.

Two new brief interviews have been published with George R.R. Martin regarding HBO’s Game of Thrones series, looking at his view on the show as an old hand at Hollywood television and as the creator of the “A Song of Ice and Fire” series on which its based. The first of the two pieces came from the LA Times blog, Hero Complex, in which GRRM discusses his concern for how viewers will treat the second season after a major character leaves the show, drawing on experience on “Beauty and the Beast” where the controversial departure of Linda Hamilton mortally wounded the show.

The other article, posted today, is a brief interview with THR’s Live Feed blog. He notes that fantasy has been around for thousands of years, but it’s been treated as material exclusively for children in the modern era until relatively recently. Asked about how season 2 will compare to his novel, A Clash of Kings, he says:

Straight from HBO, the new piece we’ve been waiting for—originally scheduled to appear on On Demand on the 16th, it’ll actually be debuting on the network on the 18th at 4:30PM EST/1:30PM PST—is available online! See the embeded video below:

Screencaps with notable details can be found here.

HBO’s just come out with a Youtube video, promoting the fact that the first season of Game of Thrones will begin re-run on Thursdays at 10PM, beginning January 26th. Mark your calendars!

Sky Atlantic in the UK has just announced the fact that the second season (or series, as they say in the UK) of Game of Thrones will air just one day after the US premiere, April 2nd at 9PM.

As they note, that’s less than 24 hours from the U.S. premiere, just like last year. It’s an impressive example of Sky and HBO working together to minimize delays. And to head off arguments… airing simultaneously—which would mean airing the show at 2 AM—just isn’t economically feasible, as Sky Atlantic is partially supported by ads, and having the first airing take place at a relatively “dead” hour just doesn’t make any sense. 9PM on Mondays places the show squarely in prime time.

And will, no doubt, lead to fewer sleep-deprived zombies entering the workplace come Monday morning.

Subterranean Press has just announced that they’ll be producing a limited edition of George R.R. Martin’s first novel, Dying of the Light. A science fiction novel written at a time when Martin had made waves as one of the foremost short fiction writers in the genre, Dying of the Light is a personal favorite, in large part because of the evocative writing and the setting, the dying festival planet of Worlorn which is soon going to see its “dying of the light”. Fans of A Song of Ice and Fire may spot some characters or themes that are precursors to Martin’s bestselling fantasy series.

Pre-ordering is now available, and the pre-order page includes some samples of artist Tom Kidd‘s illustrations and paintings for the nove.

And he did it again: Peter Dinklage took home the Golden Globe for Best Supporting Actor for his role as Tyrion Lannister , which certainly made up for any sadness over Game of Thrones losing out to the (exceptional) Homeland for Best TV Drama.

Thanking George R.R. Martin, executive producers David Benioff and Dan Weiss, and more, Dinklage finished his acceptance speech by noting he was thinking of Martin Henderson, whom he suggested viewers Google; Henderson is a dwarf in Britain who received serious injuries when he was attacked in apparent “dwarf tossing” incident.

Here’s Dinklage’s acceptance speech below:

Unless I’m misunderstanding, I believe this interview was actually recorded in the summer of 2011 during GRRM’s book tour for the release of A Dance with Dragons, but in any case, it was posted two days ago. We’ve linked it in the Citadel’s So Spake Martin collection of correspondence, interviews, and signing reports, but will embed below.

No real spoilers to speak of, and no discussion of the TV series, but some interesting reflections on his work both past and present… as well as one rather inexplicable question.

As George himself noted at “Not a Blog”, Game of Thrones scored a prestigious honor when the American Film Institute announced its list of ten film and ten television programs that had shown their excellence in the prior year, naming HBO’s hit fantasy drama among many other noteworthy programs selected by AFI’s jury. Yesterday was the AFI Awards luncheon where the various honorees received certificates ... and guess who showed up to receive them?

Jason Momoa, Emilia Clarke, and George R.R. Martin.

GRRM is indeed over in LA, and he’ll be in the audience for the Golden Globes along with David Benioff, D.B. Weiss, and Peter Dinklage as Game of Thrones battles for Best Television Drama and Dinklage sees if he can repeat his Emmy victory for Best Supporting Actor at the Globes. Will he manage it? Ken Tucker at EW thinks so, as does Tim Goodman at The Hollywood Reporter (who also thinks Thrones should take the television prize).

Below is the AFI’s video revealing their award honorees:

Yes, April Fool’s Day—April 1—will see the debut of season 2 of HBO’s acclaimed series adapting George R.R. Martin’s “A Song of Ice and Fire”. This is according to Variety reporter Stuart Levine, in this tweet from TCA, the regular series of press tours for the Television Critics Association. His just-filed report states the following about the show:

What to do until then?

January 16th should see a brand new behind-the-scenes on HBO On Demand (and, we devoutly hope, on line), featuring the filming in and around Dubrovnik in Croatia, and no doubt there’ll be more trailers, teasers, interviews, and so on and so forth to keep us all occupied. Oh, and there’s the complete box sets (US: Blu-ray, DVD; UK: Blu-ray, DVD) to keep us busy in March, just in time for a marathon session (or five).

Tor has launched its 2011 Reader’s Choice Awards, giving fans a chance to have their say in what their favorite works of the last year were. Voting’s easy: just sign up for a; make sure to follow the rules!

You can nominate as many titles you like in the following categories: Best Novel, Best Short Fiction, Best Cover Art, Best Graphic Novel. You all probably have notions for what to suggest as your favorite novels last year, but I’d like to recommend comic book fans consider nominating Criminal: The Last of the Innocent by Ed Brubaker (for my money, one of the best writers working in the field right now) and Sean Phillips. If you’ve read it, you know how good it is as it mixes crime fiction with a deconstruction of the classic Archie comic characters (yes, really). And if you haven’t read it yet, what are you waiting for?

Valyrian Steel, makers of officially licensed replica weapons based on “A Song of Ice and Fire”, have noted via their Facebook page that their stock of Ice—the Stark heirloom sword—has just dipped under 50% of the limited run of about 2,000 weapons.

They have also just noted that a low-numbered case of Arya’s Stark sword Needle turned up, and the next five orders will get numbers 49, 51, 52, 53, or 54. Here’s Maisie Williams (Arya Stark) with an example of Needle that George sent to her as a gift last year.

Yesterday, we shared a (very spoilery) interview with actor Tom Wlaschiha, a new addition to the series who’ll be playing the role of the mysterious Jaqen H’ghar. Well… he’s supposed to be mysterious, but Wlaschiha really does reveal quite a lot about the character, so if you’re unfamiliar with A Clash of Kings, don’t read it!

Next up, Nonso Anozie—the actor cast in the role of Xaro Xhoan Daxos, who plays a central role in Daenerys’s season 2 storyline—is caught at the red carpet for his latest film, The Grey, and speaks about his role a bit in a rather less spoilery way.

George R.R. Martin mentioned the interview with noted historical fiction author Bernard Cornwell—creator of the Sharpe series of novels, which were famously brought to television with Sean Bean in the title role (a fact that Martin mentions, in light of Bean’s role in Game of Thrones)—on his Not a Blog, but noted that Amazon could only post an extract. He’s made an update, however, noting that the full interview can now be found on his website in the News section.

As Georged noted earlier, Cornwell’s familiar with “A Song of Ice and Fire”, so there’s some references to them from him scattered across the interview—quite cool!

Last night, we spotted the fact that A Feast of Ice and Fire: The Official Cookbook Companion to A Game of Thrones was now available to pre-order, with a June 26th publication date.

We mentioned this last night Twitter and Facebook, but it was quite late so we saved this post for today.

BenBella Books will be publishing Beyond the Wall: Exploring George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire in June of this year, as part of their Smart Pop series. Edited by James Lowder, the anthology collects critical essays from a number of writers that examine the novels from various perspectives. We’ve seen a partial list of topics, and there promises to be some very interesting material in there.

The full list of contributors or topics can’t be shared yet, but we can name a couple, at least: us.

Thanks to Focus Home Interactive, the European publisher, we have a few new screenshots from the officially licensed Game of Thrones roleplaying game, created by Cyanide. We’ve had a lot of new information of late, so check that out if you want to know a bit more about the game.

These screen shots provide a little additional mystery to the storyline, hinting at curious turns of the plot, some mysterious new figures, a bit of new heraldry, and a glimpse at what combat will look like in terms of information on display as you fight. Also, a couple of shots of Dog—ugly as sin, but he’s surprisingly cute; I think it’s because I expected some sort of direwolf-sized mastiff, and instead he’s… well, not anything that big (very pointy teeth, though).

That list of award nominations? May be getting to be two arms long, rather than just one, now that the Directors Guild has announced its nominations for achievement in television direction. And… you guessed it, HBO’s Game of Thrones makes that list too.

In this case, it’s veteran director Tim van Patten getting acknowledged for his excellent work in directing the first episode of the series, “Winter is Coming”. Here’s the write-up the DGA nomination provides for the director:

His competition? Michael Cuesta for the pilot of Homeland, Vince Gilligan for Breaking Bad‘s “Face Off”, Patty Jenkins for the pilot of The Killing (which, despite all the problems that developed as the show barreled to the end, was a beautifully directed episode, in my opinion), and Michael Waxman for Friday Night Lights‘s “Always”.

Van Patten’s extensive prior record with the DGA, while all the others are first-time nominees, may make it seem like he’d be the favorite. And, who knows, maybe he is. But all the other directors are absolutely worthy, so it seems to us that the award could be anyone’s this season. Still, we’ll be partisan and cheer on Van Patten and Game of Thrones.

Thanks to @olafkeith, we were pointed to the fact that some end-of-year information had come out for the publishing industry… and as it happens, “A Song of Ice and Fire” left its mark on the lists on both sides of the Atlantic.

First up, Publisher’s Weekly recaps 2011 in the US market. When discussing how long paperbacks stayed on their bestseller list, this is what they had to say:

According to Ireland’s RTE, the Irish Film & Television Awards nominees have been announced, and HBO’s Game of Thrones—predominantly shot in Northern Ireland last year—has scored five nominations. The awards are given to Irish-born, Irish citizens, or full-time Irish residents. Here’s the list:

• Best Drama: Game of Thrones (Mark Huffam & Generator Entertainment)
• Director, Television Drama: Brian Kirk (directed “Lord Snow”, “Cripples, Bastards, and Broken Things”, and “The Wolf and the Lion”)
• Actress in a Lead Television Role : Michelle Fairley (Catelyn Stark)
• Actor in a Supporting Television Role: Aidan Gillen (Littlefinger; Gillen is also nominated in a lead role for Love/Hate)
• Sound: Ronan Hill & Sound Post Production Team (Generator Entertainment)

The awards will be presented on February 12 in Dublin.

After our reporting on the Visual Effects Society nominations for Game of Thrones, we were reminded of the fact that BlueBolt were not going to be lead VFX vendors for the show this season, per our interview with Lucy Ainsworth-Taylor. So, who had stepped up to do the job?

Some Googling reveals that the information has been out there, but it seems none of the fan sites noticed: Pixomondo, “an international visual effects company with a global network of studios in Berlin, Frankfurt, Munich, Stuttgart, Los Angeles, London, Shanghai, Beijing and most recently Toronto,” has landed the job.

The list of awards shows that have placed HBO’s Game of Thrones on their short list is as long as my arm at this point. But here’s one more: the Visual Effects Society announced the nominees for their awards, and in the broadcast categories the show did quite well, pulling in three nominations; the leading show was sibling Boardwalk Empire, with four.

Here’s the categories in which it’s nominated:

UPDATE: HBO has confirmed the breakdown of directors below.

This one’s for those who are interested in some of the minutia of the production. We’ve previously tried to piece together which directors were directing each episode, and we had about half of them figured out after some speculation. The last pieces of the puzzle seem likely to have fallen into place, if this CV from an actor on the show - Darren Killeen, credited as “Baratheon Guard”—is anything to go by.

In it, he lists his experience on the show as covering episodes 3 and 5, and Alik Sakharov (first season cinematographer) and David Petrarca as the directors. Assuming that they’re listed in the correct order (and we believe they are, because we know for a fact that Petrarca directed episode 4, and it’s common for directors to get continguous episode blocks to work on), here’s who we think are directing the ten episodes of the second season of Game of Thrones:

Pearson Moore, who provided this site a number of well-received essays in the course of the season, has let us know that his collected essays (including additional ones never before published on this or any site) are now available as part of the Amazon Prime book borrowing program, free of charge for those who are Amazon Prime subscribers. It’s a great opportunity for Amazon Prime subscribers to take advantage of that offer, and for fans in general to read a number of excellent essays and articles considering Game of Thrones as a series and the world of “A Song of Ice and Fire”. You can get to the books—either to borrow through the program, or purchase outright—at the following links:

• Game of Thrones Season One Essays
• Direwolves and Dragons Vol. 1.01
• Direwolves and Dragons Vol. 1.02

This is a bit late, but neat. Via our forum, we learned that Furthur—a band founded by former Grateful Dead members Bob Weir and Phil Lash—held a concert on December 31st… and their “midnight moment”? Daenerys riding a dragon,  to the tune of the Rolling Stones’ “Start Me Up”, followed by “Sugar Magnolia” after midnight. Quite cool! Besides “Dany”, a “Jorah Mormont” is also present for the 8-minute spectacular.

As noted on the forum, the audio of the concert was recorded and is now available at Archive.org.

Below is an embed of the “midnight moment”, and some discussion of how the Grateful Dead were almost involved in a film adaptation of one of Martin’s novels.

Just as with the early look at Loras Tyrell’s armor last season, this video has to be one of my favorite’s so far, focusing as it does on Simon Brindle’s armor design for HBO’s Game of Thrones. Here’s the video:

And Game of Thrones scores yet another nomination in a guild award, this time from the Art Directors Guild. The award is handed out to production designers for their work on a single episode, and in this case production designer Gemma Jackson and episode 6, “A Golden Crown”, are featured.

HBO’s show joins sibling show Boardwalk Empire, as well as Pan Am, American Horror Story, and The Playboy Club. The awards ceremony will be held in Bevery Hills on February 4th. Congratulations to Ms. Jackson and the production team, and good luck!

Back in December, we shared the fact that HBO’s Game of Thrones was up in a number of categories for TV.com’s Best of 2011 awards, which are voted on by the public. The results are now in—and the show did quite well, capturing Best New Series and Best Drama series, reaching the #2 spot in three other categories (Best Dramatic Actor, Best Kid Character, and Biggest Badass). Another feather in the cap for the show and its cast!

Some time after midnight, and still quite awake, Linda had the idea that perhaps we should get around to recording a new Westeros.org video... and what better topic to discuss than the chapter from The Winds of Winter that George released as a holiday gift for his readers.

It’s sparked quite a lot of discussion on the forum, and in our 15 minutes of video we just touch on several of the more discussed topics. Hope you like it! And apologies for the quick sign off—we only just discovered afterwards that Youtube had graciously allowed us to record videos longer than 15 minutes. Which means we can be more expansive in the future.

Suffice it to say, there will be spoilers!