Westeros

The Emmy nomination ballots have been published for the nominating voters to make use of. These ballots contain the submissions from various shows and networks for awards, and the nominating ballots will narrow that list down to the final nominees. Naturally, Game of Thrones shows up quite a bit! See our summary of the series’ submissions below.

Sky Atlantic snuck this one up on us, not having told us they were having Michelle Fairley’s interview just then! Very interesting hearing the actress (who doesn’t give many interviews at all) discuss her character and Robb. And, yes, they have Linda and I on towards the end to discuss the episode. Good times!

And “The Pointy End” (yes, recap and analysis of the episode still to come) has hit a new high for an original airing, with 2.715 million viewers according to TV By the Numbers. That’s up 13% from last week’s figure. Overnight, the show’s pulled in 3.6 million viewers, according to Deadline Hollywood.

In the U.K., Game of Thrones is holding steady on the overnights, 523,000 viewers (just 4,000 less than the previous week). More importantly, total viewership across the week is in concerning episode 6, and that’s reached 1.621 million viewers, according to BARB, the Broadcasters’ Audience Research Board.

Thanks to WyvernWood for the U.K. information.

Just to bring everyone up to speed on this and past downtime issues:

In the last couple of months, the A Song of Ice and Fire forum has boomed, becoming the #1 spot on the web to discuss the series, and we thought that was the major part of the issues. We’ve worked hard to address many issues, and have succeeded to some degree. But ... we just discovered another part: the Wiki of Ice and Fire. We never realized just how used the wiki is (as an aside—hats off to our various wiki editors who’ve made it such a fantastic resource! Anyone who’s a member of the forum can join in editing it, BTW), until we put in Google Analytics a couple of days ago….

It turns out the wiki draws even more traffic than the forum does! No wonder the forum was suddenly unable to keep up with the crush: it was fighting for MySQL connection space with the wiki. This led us to experiment with a major increase in maximum MySQL connections allowed, but that was badly advised on my part—we should have waited for a quieter period to try it. It ended up completely choking the server, so much so that our wonderful host (Sparks) could only reboot it in hopes of getting in after it restarted to fix things…. but the crush of traffic to the wiki and forum meant that it was no go. Ultimately, the server had to be taken down and a tech at the data center shut off Apache before putting it back on the web for Sparks to settle it down. The reboots and extreme hard disk and memory usage led to corruption that also had to repaired.

End result? Boy, howdy, Westeros.org is an extremely popular site—thank you very much, to our visitors, the members of the forum, the wiki editors, Sparks, and everyone else who’s contributed to its existence!—but we need to do more tinkering. This may well include a move to a mightier server, and some other back-end changes to help alleviate the problems as far as possible. The serve move, if it happens, may happen as soon as next week.

More info when we have it .. and please, keep an eye out for our annual summer fundraiser, a way to pay back Sparks for the work she’s done and to make sure the forum and wiki can keep on going!

A little bird has pointed out that Game of Thrones has garnered its first nomination, in the Critics’ Choice Awards‘s Best Drama Series category. A big category with some big competition, including fellow HBO series Boardwalk Empire, AMC’s tremendous Mad Men, and AMC’s own page-to-screen adaptation The Walking Dead.

Congratulations to the cast and crew of the series! Although there’s no other nominations, we expect to see a few more of these coming along in the days and months to come.

George R.R. Martin has updated his official site with some an additional event date in “Appearances”, plus some new posts in “Not a Blog”. Of note is this post in which he gives a sneak peek at Valyrian Steel‘s warhammer for King Robert, designed to GRRM’s detailed specifications. That would certainly dent some steel and crack a few bones, we suspect…

Also, in this post, he shares a reminder that he will be signing at Hastings Books in Albuqerque, at 1:00PM, for the release of the Doorways graphic novel adapted by GRRM from his pilot script for a science fiction TV series he developed and which got as far as a pilot. The book, published by IDW, collects the six issue comic book series.

Publisher’s Weekly is first out of the gate with a very early review of A Dance with Dragons (Preorder: US, UK), which is due July 12th, probably off a galley proof with the ink still wet!

The review does contain some spoilers, so beware. Here’s a non-spoiler excerpt, however:

For the full, spoilerish review, go here.

George R.R. Martin and Neil Gaiman have contributed items to Meta-Games Unlimited, a gaming story in Missouri, for their charitable efforts following the devastating tornado that Joplin, Missouri on May 22nd. The items will be placed on E-bay beginning June 6th, and the auctions will last one week.

A number of autographed books and other items are there from GRRM, including a singed copy of A Game of Thrones, a signed pre-release A Feast for Crow chapbook that was released by the publisher back in 20034 or 2005 or thereabouts, a signed Tuf Voyaging (mistakingly titled The Voyaging), a number of gaming books for Wild Cards and the A Song of Ice and Fire Roleplaying Game from Green Ronin, and more.

The Evening Standard magazine has a “diary” piece by none other than Charles Dance, who plays the Lannister patriarch Lord Tywin in Game of Thrones. He mentions the series at a couple of points, but mostly it’s a fine look at his daily life as an actor from his own perspective.

Particularly love the anecdote about Sir John Gielgud at the end.

Patrick St. Denis of Pat’s Fantasy Hotlist has a special contest for fans of George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire. As Pat explains, he had a series of wagers with GRRM that he finally won (if I’m not mistaken, George won the first couple of bets). What did he win? The chance to have a character named after him that would die a gruesome death in a novel of the series. As it happens, Ser Patrek of King’s Mountain (a reference to Montreal) is now in A Dance with Dragons, and he does indeed die a gruesome death.

But just how does he die? That’s the question Anne Groell, the book’s editor, poses to fans who want a chance to win an autographed copy of A Dance with Dragons. Pat provides a list of manners of deaths that he suggests actually happen in the novel (and therefore could be considered spoilers—you’ve been warned), and asks those who want to enter the contest to take a guess as to how brave Ser Patrek meets his end.

Good luck to those taking a stab at it!

Usually, HBO releases two of these… but it looks like there’s just one, at least for now. It’s a nice peek, though, as it features a bit of Tyrion and Bronn interaction. And, you know, Bronn’s actual name for the first name! I do wonder, however, at the lack of horses…

David J. Peterson, creator of the Dothraki language for HBO’s Game of Thrones, answered a few questions for Linda and I concerning his work on the project—including information on one of the languages he created for the show that not so many fans are aware about!

You can find the interview over at Suvudu, Random House’s portal for SF/F and more!

Our ongoing series of podcasts with MTV Geek‘s Tom and Daniel now has caught up to episode 7! You can find it over at our episode guide. Beware, some spoilers for the second season inherent to the discussion.

Award-winning artist John Picacio—recently nominated for three Chesley Awards—continues his sneak peeks for the 2012 A Song of Ice and Fire Calendar after having previously given a look at Bran Stark.

Fans were asked to vote, and it looks the Hound trumped Arya Stark and Melisandre of Asshai as the subject of his next sneak peek.

The calendar is due to be released July 12, and Picacio and GRRM will be on hand for autographs when it’s sold at San Diego Comic Con.

Our latest A Song of Ice and Fire-related article is up at Tor.com: “The Brothers Baratheon”. It’s a consideration on the dynamics between the three Baratheon brothers, their separate histories, and their differing attitudes and capacities. For us, the three brothers are nearly as central to the story as the “big three” of Stark, Lannister, and Targaryen, with their roles in the narrative having long-range impact that affects everyone in the narrative.

For more of our articles, you can look here to find them all.