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“Bran thought about it. 'Can a man still be brave if he's afraid?'
'That is the only time a man can be brave,' his father told him.”

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Game_of_Thrones

The game can be daunting and long (~4 hours), but the gameplay is very cool!

I recently bought "A Game Of Thrones" (book one in the series) by George R. R Martin.

It's just something different.

Does Google Books do it better than Kindle, Nook, or iBooks (or Kobo)? No, but it does it just as well and works for me.

That said I'm still kind of torqued that the four volume paperback of the first four books in the "A Game of Thrones " series is ~$20 while the eBooks are ~$30. I know they are just trying to move the inventory to make way for the 5-book version that is sure to come along but still...

When I need to write distraction free I open a fullscreen Vim terminal window. I copy the pages into a more shareable format after I draft them in plain text.

As a side note HBO picked up the rights to AGOT and is currently filming the series which should be airing sometime in 2011.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0944947/

Martin is an incredible writer and the books have lots of depth. His characters are amazing. I've read them a couple times and continue to find them fantastic.

Martin chooses each detail that he writes about with intent, while not always apparent on your first reading, he has an artful way of layering plot points or connecting characters with subtle details.

It isn't even obvious that Martin himself wouldn't benefit from the additional publicity of giving his earliest books away for free, then selling the sequels. Though I doubt it in this particular case, because of the whole HBO-series angle: presumably Martin is collecting royalties on the TV show, and collected option payments even before the show was made, and if the original book was out of copyright HBO needn't have paid these fees. But the works that are in peril aren't the ones that get optioned for movies and TV: Adapted works stay in print, if only as a form of tie-in merchandise for the show.

Some creative works simply take a while to get going in the culture. I don't think we should punish creative folks who are, for lack of a better term, "ahead of their time." Obviously this concept could be taken to an absurd extreme, but I would argue that 25 years is better than 14. It's at least closer to the duration of a full human generation.

My girlfriend is an extremely fast reader, somewhere around 3 pages/min. E.g. she just read A Game of Thrones in a couple days.

I'm not a slow reader by any means, but even a two-fold speed boost would make it dramatically easier to finish books; I have too many competing interests to spend more than an hour on any given book per day, and if it's going to take me a week to finish a book, there are just too many opportunities to put it aside and start something else.

He can turn a clever phrase, but he tends to indulge himself. When he does, he gets way too cute. He's got the descriptive power to be a great writer, but he needs to be a better self editor.

Reading this story reminded me of my endurance-slog through the first few chapters of A Game of Thrones. George R. R. Martin is a fantastic storyteller, but he's also a serial adjective abuser. Same thing here. The story almost gets lost in the words. What we gain in postcard moments, we lose in pacing and flow.

To torture this analogy further, in the world you're presenting, a janitor has to beg for tips or rely upon their fans to get paid for their efforts.

> And you think your contributions deserve special treatment?

This assumes that there's no original thought, or production, or anything else in this day and age. I fundamentally disagree with this. To use a popular example, the archetypes presented in "A Game of Thrones" may have existed for decades or centuries, but they're presented in a wholly original story. A story which would not have existed in the past, present, or future if it wasn't for GRRM, and by extension, his ability to work full time writing his books.

> Keep in mind that the tool we are using to communicate was made public domain by Tim Berners Lee.

No, the tool we're using was originally created by Paul Graham, and is not public domain.

In any case, it appears that there are irreconcilable differences in the foundations of our opinions (and politeness). I wish you luck.

GRRM manages to create an alternate world that feels real, where characters have flaws, nothing is black and white, and the good guys don't always (or even frequently) win. By far the best book (and series) I've ever read.

~ Ned Stark, A Game of Thrones.

I think that pathetic blog post where they tried to justify their actions made one thing clear - SourceForge knows how dead they are. No amount of internet outrage is going to help, they don't think they've got anything to lose at this point.

The best thing to do at this point would be to speed up their demise. If you're a developer that still hosts with them, delete your project and move to Github or Bitbucket.

Also, start reporting these malicious pages to Google so they don't show up in search results. https://www.google.com/safebrowsing/report_badware/

Also started The Land of Lisp as a total Lisp newby and got royally confused at the end of 1st section with cons, car, cdr, cadr… what?

Having to wait for the server for the set of legal moves feels like a hack. It's way simpler to have the client have its own copy of the game state, and allow "query" methods (methods that fetches data about the game state but don't modify it). This allows you to make _powerful_ UI, which can show any kind of information the user needs about the game like predictions about what would happen if a move is done, computing things so the user doesn't need to.

If I had to redo it, I would use a paradigm similar to how boardgame.io[2] works, which is similar to how fixed lockstep works. The server and the clients all keep a full state of the game and when a player makes an action, it is transmitted to all the actors, who apply this action to their own state of the game. Since the game rules are deterministic, the final state of the game will be the same for each actor. The only 2 complex to handle are randomness and secrets (the former can actually be solved by the later), but overally, the complexity is managed elegantly and you can separate networking code from gameplay code easily.

Actually, one of my future possible project would be to make a library similar to boardgame.io, but less opiniated, and in the future, offer a platform to easily host and launch a game coded with it.

[1] https://boardgame.io/

[2] https://swordsandravens.net/

Try finding A Game of Thrones as an ebook if you live outside the US. It's only been out for 15 years, so I guess I shouldn't expect too much.

I had imagined that maybe publishers would like to make money from people attracted by the new HBO series. But I guess that's why I'm not in the book publishing industry, because I obviously understand nothing about how to make money.

Edit: looks like I might be able to get a Kindle version. I don't have a Kindle, but given the inability of anyone except Amazon to deliver I might have to switch platforms.

It makes it to the table with my group of friends because it takes much less time to play than Diplomacy.

Just like Diplomacy, you may not want to play it with people who take the board game backstabbing stuff too seriously.

A Game of Thrones, GRRM. The new preview chapter restarted my hype train and reminded me how much I missed reading the books. So I started another read-through, hoping I'll be done by the release of the next book.

I've also been reading lots of stuff on Git. I'm trying to learn everything I can about hooks so that I can start doing awesome things automatically, and I feel it's the one aspect of git workflows I haven't explored yet.

But they would not necessarily be able to use the name "Game of Thrones" in the title, because thats a trademark. As long as he is alive he has that name available to him to distribute as he wishes.

I feel 5 year copyright + ability to renew it once for a total 10 year duration is plenty of time for government sponsored monopoly on distribution and derivation. Because that is all copyright is. But thanks to that system, almost any fan made Star Wars work is technically violating George Lucas' copyright on everything in the universe he made, and he could realistically sue a truckload of fan sites.

And you can't guarantee fair use saving them. It is intentionally vague, and it just takes one bad judge's ruling to change precedent (even at the Supreme Court level).

This is what it all comes down to, whether at Bing, or at any other large organization. The other bullet points on Philip's list are fine, but this one is perhaps wholly sufficient. Politics exists in every organization. And every organization has some folks who are more Machiavellian than others. But all of this crap comes to the forefront, amplified and accelerated, when an organization is in turmoil. (And that atmosphere of turmoil usually trickles down from the top; a divisional leader who's always politicking and maneuvering inspires his lieutenants to do the same, and on and on it goes).

I've had the distinct displeasure of working for at least three large divisions of megagiant companies in varying degrees of peril or stagnation, and all three of them -- despite wildly different corporate cultures and people -- became similar hotbeds of political intrigue. Declining quarterlies led to re-orgs, and re-orgs led to chaos, and chaos bred more chaos. And in this crucible people forged schemes, machinations, alliances, and double-crosses that would make A Game of Thrones look like a Dr. Seuss book.

This phenomenon is notable because the same people, operating in the same groups, did not behave so politically in better times. Like I said, I'm sure that a few of them were always plotting and conniving. But only when the division went into steady decline did the sheep cast off their clothing and reveal the wolves beneath.

Technical things I am working through are the:

- https://www.extension.harvard.edu/open-learning-initiative/a... along with the Artin text, writing proofs out by hand and in Lean.

- Seven Sketches in Compositionality: https://arxiv.org/abs/1803.05316