Game of Thrones, episode one:

So tonight I sat down to watch HBO's Game of Thrones with SP, a fantasy fan who has never read the books, and N, who's seen a few fantasy movies. Much to my surprise, all three of us had the same, deep, almost visceral reaction:

BAD SOUND EDITING.

So terrible, in fact, that we decided to try to turn on the closed captioning, which, on Brighthouse HBO, turned out to be not as simple as, say, turning on the closed captioning. In fact, after you turn on the closed captioning, you must then perform a number of other steps, including contacting Brighthouse, spending some quality time with a Brighthouse representive, resetting the cable box, and then attempting to convince the TV that, really, yes, everyone watching speaks English, not Spanish. This in turn led to me spending some time translating the Spanish subtitles into English and then all of us rewatching bits of the show with the English closed captioning. At which point the viewing experience decidedly improved. However. These were not, as you can imagine, optimal viewing conditions, and I sincerely hope that HBO improves the sound quality on future episodes especially for those of us not viewing the show in surround sound conditions without multiple speakers.

On the bright side, kudos to HBO for providing what seems to be quite accurate and occasionally even poetic Spanish closed captioning! Moving on.

( Spoilery for the first episode and mildly spoilery for the first book. )

storySouth Million Writers Award

In a bit of surprise, I learned last night that my short story, Mademoiselle and the Chevalier, was selected as one of the storySouth Million Writers Award notable stories of 2010. A surprise, because as I've previously noted, Fantasy Magazine had a very good year last year, and I expected this story to be completely overshadowed by other brilliance.

In related good news, tithenai received a nod for her short story, "The Green Book," which also, as you might remember, received a well-earned Nebula nomination, aliettedb got a nod for Memories in Bronze, Feathers and Blood, catvalente got a nod for Thirteen Ways of Looking at Space/Time, and rachel_swirsky for Defiled Imagination AND The Lady Who Plucked Red Flowers Beneath the Queen's Window (another well-earned Nebula nomination). Which just proves that I have a very very awesome friends list.

This is an interesting award, mostly because it looks at mainstream and genre works together: the main criteria are "online" and "at least 1000 words," which the internet being what it is, includes quite a lot of works. It's rare to see an award do this – most of the awards I've seen have been either aimed at genre – and in most cases, a very specific sort of genre – or focused on "literary" fiction, which admittedly can contain genre elements, despite an ongoing tendency (hi, New York Times) to consider genre as some sort of lower class literature by some of those literary fiction people.

Anyway, I digressed. (Shocking, I know) Congratulations to everyone. Voting for the reader's poll for this apparently starts up fairly soon, so expect a quick follow-up post later.