Category: nerd

I said a while back, “Wait’ll I tell you about the Hound,” and here we are weeks later and I haven’t done it.

Grievous oversight. Must correct.

Okay, so if you’ve followed my adventures with the Rory McCann fansite for long enough, you have seen me address this already, though I’m pretty sure I shitcanned that post when I started the blog over. You probably won’t mind reading my theory again. For the rest of you? This will probably blow your mind. When I first thought of it, no one in the fandom seemed to be talking about it, so far as I was able to ascertain. I would be surprised if they have since picked it up. I have this whole aura around me that prevents people listening to me. Well, fine. I don’t mind keeping it all to myself. Fuck all y’all.

But I do need to put it out into the internet again with a date stamp on it, just so you can see I said it and when. Haha.

All right. Pull up a chair. To sit in. Not to hit me with. You good? Okay.

Now, this is going to be about the books, not about the TV show. Several elements I’ll mention here never made it into Game of Thrones. Keep up.

So. We all know about the scene during the Battle of the Blackwater when Sansa goes back to her chambers and it turns out Sandor Clegane is there. The Hound is, in fact, massively drunk and has been lying on her bed, possibly in a drunken half-stupor, waiting for her to come back. We find out in A Storm of Swords in his final fevered rant to Arya, just as she’s about to abandon him, that he had been planning to rape Sansa but for whatever reason, he changed his mind. The actual sequence of events: he grabbed Sansa, he put a knife to her throat, and he ordered her to sing him a song. She complied, he started to cry, he stepped away from her and ripped off his Kingsguard cloak, and then he left her alone in the room.

With me so far?

Okay, so. In a later book we have a scene where Sansa is remembering the Hound from the night of the Blackwater battle, and specifically “remembers” him kissing her. Fans caught on to this quickly and pulled George R. R. Martin up about it, to which Martin replied that Sansa was an “unreliable narrator.” But it didn’t make any sense to me that Sansa would just convince herself the Hound kissed her, and while she strove to be unfailingly polite and to cover her tracks so the Lannisters wouldn’t murder her, she didn’t strike me as someone who lied for fun, either to others or to herself. So what was going on here?

After observing the other Stark kids with their direwolves, it hit me.

If you only saw the show, you didn’t get to appreciate the strength of the warg connection between the Stark kids and their direwolves. These kids were literally reading their direwolves’ minds. Actually, child and wolf talked with one another, sometimes across great distances — Nymeria, for instance, found Arya’s dead mother and Arya witnessed the find from hundreds of miles away. In her sleep. Even Jon/Aegon — even though we find out in the show that he’s a Targaryen (and Martin backs this up), even though as a Targaryen he can warg a dragon, we see he can also warg a direwolf, as he does Ghost. (Another nod to the “song of ice and fire”???) Human and wolf can sense one another’s emotions, see the world as the other party sees it, and all of this long distance.

Remember how I said Sandor told Arya in their last conversation that he had wanted to rape Sansa? He also stated that he regretted not doing so. “I should have fucked her bloody… before leaving her for that dwarf.” (In the books, Sandor despises Tyrion. He is quite upset to learn that Tyrion has wed the “little bird.”)

So here’s a scenario for you. We know that in that last conversation with Arya, Sandor was trying to rile her up into killing him. What if he hadn’t actually wanted to rape Sansa? What if… he actually loves her?

What if he was consumed, after the Blackwater, with the wish that he’d kissed her?

What if Sansa was picking that up long distance? Because think about it. When you really want to do something, you envision yourself doing it usually, right? If that’s what Sansa picked up, it would have been like she was experiencing the kiss.

“What Sansa picked up?” you’re asking. “Why would Sansa pick anything up from the Hound?”

Because… Sansa warged him.

Remember, Sandor first took an interest in Sansa AFTER Lord Stark executed her direwolf, Lady. And this happened around the same time the other Stark kids (and Jon/Aegon) began forming a psychic connection to their wolves. Sansa’s to Lady must have just been developing when Robert passed sentence on Lady. So… would Sansa have needed to redirect it?

It wouldn’t have been on purpose. And it wouldn’t have been strong at first. And Sansa wouldn’t have known she was doing it, because she didn’t believe in wargs. Sandor must have felt as if he were developing feelings for her and of course he couldn’t figure out why. But if it’s gotten to the point she’s “seeing” him wishing he’d kissed her, and misinterpreting it as her own memory?

And, I don’t know if you noticed, but there’s a bit in the books about the wildlings having a taboo against wargs riding people. If Sansa ends up Queen in the North in the books the way she did in the show… I dunno, what do you think? D’you think there might be an itsy-bitsy little complication should the wildlings find out what’s happened with her and Sandor?

Could be all sorts of interesting.

So, yeah. My take on “SanSan” is that there is no SanSan. It’s just Sandor feeling a psychic bond he doesn’t understand and Sansa mistaking someone else’s thoughts for her own memories. Wait and see.

Hey, this realization hit me the other day and I wanted to put it somewhere in case I need to refer to it later.

People continually grouse about season 8 of Game of Thrones, really angry that GRRM made “Jon Snow” into the sixth Aegon Targaryen only for that revelation to go absolutely nowhere.

Well, let’s see, shall we.

“Born in the place of smoke and salt” = Aegon was born in Dorne. I don’t know if Dorne was ever labeled with that epithet, but it definitely fits the description.

“The song of ice and fire” = Aegon carries the bloodlines of both Stark, through his mother Lyanna, and Targaryen through his father Rhaegar. He was also instrumental in helping to end the threat of Ice posed by the Night King and definitively ended the threat of Fire posed by the Mad Queen Daenerys Targaryen.

“The prince who was promised” = Aegon was crowned king as “Jon Snow” by the North, but only because they thought he was an illegitimate Stark. (Ironic, innit, that the “rebellious” North accidentally crowned the true king?) As a Targaryen, he was never crowned. He was the crown prince and that was all. He also refused the Iron Throne, cementing his status as a prince and not a king.

I also think it’s neat the way House Targaryen started with an Aegon and ended with an Aegon.

It was the “prince who was promised” bit that finally caught me. It just landed on me one day like a ton of bricks. “OH OF COURSE.” The thing about prophecies is that we don’t pay attention to how they’re worded and assume that things are going to go a certain way. But sometimes you just have to take the words literally.

And if you think that’s fucked up, wait’ll I tell you about the Hound.

I can’t make any promises, only talk about what I’d like to do, but I’d like to get my brain together very soon and schedule work on each of the things I still want to do with my free time. Big man’s site is one of them. I need to get back to work on bringing all his pics and videos inline with what is now called the “blog.” I like the little headline I put with it, “Not from the desk of Rory McCann,” but I’ll have to think of something else to put there because I need to quit it with the unscripted updates. They will get in the way of HIS actual content and that’s not what I want to do anymore.

I wasn’t sure I wanted to use tags, but I might use tags here and then link to the Rory tag from the big-man site. If it seems self-serving to point people to my website, oh fucking well. When you are paying for my hosting service, you get a say. I will never charge anyone to look at Big Man Chronicles, not even with a Patreon account (there will, in fact, never be a Patreon account connected with it), so… good luck with that. My money my turf my rules my say. The end.

On a slight tangent, because this is still related to the Rory fandom, I accidentally found out (because I was not logged in) that Hound’s Lair was crying about Instagram changes last fall and talking about quitting. Considering I found her via Pinterest not ten minutes ago as I write this, that’s a bit stupid. There are always ways around limiting algorithms. Hell, people find my BMC site through Google searches because I tackle some things the Instagram fan accounts don’t really talk about. If you want it badly enough, you’ll get it; if you’re a quitter, go ‘head, I guess. I wouldn’t be this petty, but a lot of you who know me from BMC know that she and I locked horns five years ago. I was realizing, in fact, just a few minutes ago (as I write this), that she basically blocked me for locking horns with me on MY account. She wasn’t even using the Hound’s Lair account to argue with me, as I recall. So basically I was held to a behavioral standard for her IG when I wasn’t on her IG and didn’t know I was dealing with her. Trapped nice and neat. If you think that’s fair, go on, I guess. I can’t be fucked. So if she really does quit, I’ll be one shedding zero fucking tears about it. Wheaton’s Law applies here.

(Honestly, I remember getting offended because I posted a pic from the GOT premiere in NYC and she came along like “this is so-and-so’s picture”… in retrospect that wasn’t a bad thing to say, but it felt like she was accusing me of stealing it, which of course I was NOT passing it off as my own. Anyone who knows me knows I’ve never so much as set foot in NYC. I certainly in the post did not claim to have taken the photo. Since that argument, people have stolen my screenshots with alarming regularity and I would bet money I won’t have in a million years that she never had one single problem with that. Because she’s got flying monkeys who look in. I know how this shit works. So… just really stupid all around. It should have been a two-second fart and done and forgotten. Would have been, had I had any say in the outcome.)

Getting off the drama, this illustrates something else for me: if you want to be found, get the fuck off social media. Or, be on social media, but don’t let that be your one-trick pony. I see morons all the time claiming that websites and blogs are “obsolete.” Not if you want to keep an online presence, they’re fucking not. Did you notice Facebook and X have websites and that Instagram now allows you to upload photos from a desktop or laptop computer browser? Better wake up. These “services” are making dumber and dumber decisions all the time and I don’t give it another ten years and they’ll be going the way MySpace went: still in existence but no longer relevant. Where do you want to end up when that happens?

Yeah. Good talk. I’m gonna go watch paint dry or something. Got to be a better use of my time than this post was.

(I’m lying. I’ve got no wet paint in my vicinity. But I’ll find something to do.)

Small stuff, but a blog post and an editing of the Photos page and a NEW PHOTO ADDED OMG.

You will just have to find it. It’s not actually NEW new. It’s just new to the site. There’s a shortcut to find it if you can figure that out.

I added a little bit of snark and I probably won’t keep it, but that’s just my mood right now. Can everyone please stop fucking watermarking celeb photos that you didn’t actually take? Please? I’m begging you? Especially when it’s clear you’re a SanSan fetishist. Cringe.

I’m changing my approach a little bit with this stuff though. I will still link to sources but I’m going to host as much as I feel I can get away with actually on the fan site instead of relying on embeds. I don’t entirely like it, but several years back I experienced my embeds disappearing because someone changed the back-end code and I don’t know if that’s happened again, but I want to guard against it. Now, I’m not going to swipe every photo of Rory I see, but I’m gonna grab the representative stuff. And if anyone wants to sue me for that, you better get your lawyers ready because you’re gonna have to sue all of Instagram and Pinterest too. And MY lawyer’s gonna see that you do. If I can retain one.

But most people are reasonable about fan sites. It’s not like the big man is CEO of Disney. I’ll still link to sources when I know them, too. Hopefully, that helps.

—

What the fuck is wrong with Pinterest? I was trying to find the old story about him rocketing his ass down a snowy mountain because he was cold and impatient, and I had to sell the book it was in when I was about to leave Ohio, and Pinterest was the only place I’d seen it. I don’t think I saved it off of there? But anyway, the site’s fucked. I can’t load it, and when I googled the situation, turns out the site was having weird errors for days or weeks before now. Rut-roh. I never used it worth a dern, but for some reason I’d hate to see it go.

Oh well. Onwards and whatever.

I have almost all the articles moved (see previous posts), but it’s twenty minutes to five and I want to be out of here well before five. (I’m at my friend Carrie’s house right now.)

I will very likely do more soon, but I never make promises about that because we all know how I am.

This is not the end of it. I want to bring photos and videos in line with the articles, all in the blog-post section. I think I already mentioned that I doubt I will continue calling it a blog, but that’s not the most important thing right now.

But when I get it where I want it, it will be a lot like a scrapbook, which is the effect I want. Maybe even Rory will enjoy looking at it, I don’t know. It’ll need much more tweaking before I’m totally happy with it, but I’m closer to happy than I was.

Anyway. Gotta jet. Later, ‘gators.

I am in the middle of moving articles on the fan site, and it’s going slower than I would like, and the reason it’s going slower is because I’m adding in tags so that the tag cloud will work.

I just want to get things MOVED, so I think at this point I will just move the articles, and then I will go back in later and add the tags.

If I add the tags. I’ll think about it some more but, given that the site has a search bar, I may decide to ditch them entirely. I’ll have to look up what effect that has on SEO, however, because even though that site lands on page one of Rory McCann search results on Google, so far it’s mainly the page about his love life, which I’m not even sure I want to keep. I’d like to see more stuff about Rory hit that front page instead of the spam you see in half the fucking results list. If the tags help my rating, great. If they don’t help, there’s no use keeping them.

Anyway, just wanted to share that thought process. Back to it. This should go faster now.

FYI, I’m going to do the same with the photos and videos and so on. I’m debating whether I even want to keep calling the blog page a “blog.” Not an important debate just now but, as I’m changing what goes there, I’ll want to consider it later. If anyone out there is hard-linking to anything I’ve got on the site, you may want to check in from time to time. I doubt it, but I’m covering all my bases here.

[EDIT] I can never seem to just wait to find something out. Turns out tag pages are bad for SEO. Okay, I’m killing the tag system AND the tag page. If y’all want to learn about something, the search bar will more than suffice. Glad I got that sorted out.

If you follow the fan site I run, you know it’s back up. But I didn’t want to leave things hanging here. I hate leaving loose ends. Even if it’s pointless to pick them up. Haha.

Rory’s been quite a bit more active on social media than we are accustomed to seeing him. It’s an open question whether people have been nagging him to update with the new TV show he’s doing or whether he decided on his own to post more often. I can’t even predict how long this will continue. I know he reads at least some of his comments because actor Cary Elwes (yes, the Dread Pirate Roberts his own self) has been commenting on his posts and at least once, Rory has replied. I can’t see the big man becoming an Instagram addict, though. He’s got too many interesting things going on in his life. No moss growing on that one.

I need to finish refurbing the site. It’s been in a state of limbo for a couple years now other than my occasional updates. I like to say it’ll never be finished finished unless Rory passes away or I quit, but I can at least finish moving things around like I wanted to do and then improve the header area.

And when I get that done will very likely mark the end of my running commentary there. Because it’s not MY site. Sure, it’s my site in that I own the domain and I pay for the hosting space but it isn’t about me. If people are curious, I’ll still be on the About page over there with a link to this site here. And then the commentary I was doing there, I can do here instead. Self-serving? No more than it is when I post about my personal shit there. Probably a lot less so.

I also need to put in some time on this site. It needs rearranging too. Probably won’t get to it today though. Can make no promises on how soon.

I actually am not sure where that will go. I have had some ideas about where I might like to take my life and I’ll not go into them here but Scotland’s involved somewhere. I need a thing that I can be interested in and happy about. I have too many things I’m interested in that I am not happy about. And those things do need attention, but they shouldn’t consume my whole fucking life, you know? But anyway, if I pursue the Happy Ideas, that site’s likely the first step. I want to play with it a while and then see what next steps are possible.

That was nice and clear. Like mud. Don’t worry about it.

Okay. Enough procrastinating. ‘Later.

I’m at the library in Jennings momentarily to catch a few things up and then I will be going to Lafayette, because all the money I earned last week went to insurance, not including $20 that went to gas before I found out Dad is willing to foot my gasoline expenses. I am not going to ask him for that every single time. For instance, today I had to find a gas station that “takes mixed tender,” meaning cash and debit in the same transaction, because apparently there’s one Jennings gas station that doesn’t. Don’t get me started. But I figure $20 in gas should see me through for a little while. I want an early day to maximize my chances.

That was $20 I needed to renew the domain name for Rory’s fan site. I had had it stuck in my brain that that domain name comes up for renewal on the 23rd because I could have sworn that was when I started the site in the beginning: the day before Rory’s birthday. Now, I get brain glitches. Have since forever, so I’m not going to blame middle age. So possibly I forgot the actual renewal date. But this hosting service also sneaks in ridiculous price increases, so it’s not outside the realm of possibility that they shifted the due date when I moved the domain from my old host to this one five years ago this coming August or at some other time. Also don’t get me started. I’m tired of games in general. Except the ones on my phone and laptop, and even those piss me off sometimes.

The upshot is that I had been planning to use today to earn the domain renewal money, and now I absolutely have to. My wiggle room is all gone.

Anyway. After finding out I had badly miscalculated things, I had $9 in cash that, had I been able to deposit it to my Chime over at Walgreens, I would have been able to use in addition to my existing Chime balance to have the domain name paid up yesterday. I was informed, after wasting gas I couldn’t spare to drive all the way to Jennings for the deposit, that Walgreens only accepts a minimum of $20 at a time. What the actual motherfucking fuck. I don’t remember if I have ever tried putting in less than that in the past and now the rules have changed or if I have always put in $20 or more and so this is just catching me unawares. I can’t even keep track of this shit anymore. Certainly Chime never warned me about it, either way.

(I am running out of reasons to stay with them. They’re not bad overall, just, I’m not seeing the benefit. Too much to get into here. You don’t care. Moving on now.)

So. BASICALLY. I need to go to Lafayette today, make $20, save the fucking fan site if I can, and if I can then fine, and if not, I’ll be in a good-signal zone and you’ll hear (read) my wailing and gnashing of teeth all the way over in fucking Belarus. Sorry about that. But you will know one way or the other by the end of the day. Look on my social media to keep up until I can post here again, because in my current situation social media is easier for real-time (or nearly so) updates. Instagram or Facebook. Could be either, might be both.

It’ll be a $40 minimum day, too, because I’m going to want to put gas back into the car after I have burnt it trying to save a website that maybe 50 of you a day ever look at. On a good day.

I did say, numerous times, that I will keep it going as long as I enjoy the situation. I still mostly do, so if I can keep it going, I will. But I’m also a-gonna grouse about bullshit, not because I enjoy grousing about bullshit, but because… well… it’s me. Sorry.

There is somewhat of a chance I may not be able to save the site. Depends on my hosting service’s policies. I know I already said that, but I want to make sure you read it and understand it. I warned you. I don’t know what I will do besides bitch endlessly if I fail to save it. If I think of something, I’ll let you know.

P.S. Tangentially related: The afanoficeandfire.com domain may be kaput forever. I like the IDEA of what I wanted to do, but I am not finding the REASONS to pursue it when I have more important things to do. This isn’t sour grapes; I really do have more important things to do, like rescuing the big man’s fan site and improving it, and also cleaning up the trainwreck that is my life generally, and various other things. I cannot keep all those balls in the air at once, which is why I’ve not done anything with the AFOIAF domain the entire time I’ve had it. Though admittedly part of my looking askance at the whole endeavor is I can’t see the point when Martin hasn’t even finished the fucking books. And, frankly, I’ve read the excerpts from The Winds of Winter, and… his writing “voice” is so different versus A Game of Thrones or even Dancing with Dragons that I’m actually not sure I can immerse myself anymore. I will try if he actually gets it published because I want to know what happens next, but I’d bet you the twenty bucks I wish I had right fucking now that it’s going to feel like a completely different story and also like I just wasted time I will never get back.

This is why you don’t wait literal decades between writing books in a series, kids. We had the same problem with Stephen King’s Dark Tower story. I have no doubt that a significant portion of the reading public does not notice the change in voice or tone or whatever and won’t catch errors. It might take me a few re-reads, but I do catch that shit. It takes me right out of the story, as surely as a misspelling or grammatical error does, and I found quite a few of the latter in Martin’s books as it is.

Shame. Shame. Shame. [ding]

My other issue with Martin (well… besides his unseemly fascination with big older men fucking little girls… someone please check his hard drive) is that he doesn’t have much theory of mind going for him. For instance: The reason the fandom debated for so long about which side of the Hound’s face got burned is because Martin didn’t think about what it sounded like when he wrote the sentence The left side of his face was a ruin. What he meant there was SANSA’s left as she faced Sandor and looked at his burn scars. That is not how most people parsed it, including me, because that is not how most people talk or think about right versus left as applied to the body. (I honestly believe the only reason the makeup artists got the burn side correct on Rory’s stage makeup was because they asked George directly. Or David and Dan did, and then passed the edict down to Makeup.) I’ve seen this sort of error before in writing, and Martin’s not the only one guilty of it — if you have ever seen a character say “I am from the nearby village,” you have just encountered this phenomenon — but between this and all the glaring errors with commas vs semicolons vs colons in Martin’s books, only the story itself kept me reading sometimes. When I read fiction, I want an immersive experience, not to be yanked back to reality every other paragraph because the guy I’m reading doesn’t know that “Myrish swamp” is not a complimentary comparison to female genitalia.

(Jesus Christ, GEORGE.)

It really is a good story. It probably could have stood to be in better hands. I felt the same way about the Twilight “saga.” I am loath to compare George R. R. Martin to Stephenie Meyer here, but that’s what I’m a-gonna do, because it is a fair comparison. Go ahead and hate me. I honestly can’t be fucked. Those of you who would be angry, incredulous, or mocking at what I have just said have no fucking idea what I’m talking about anyway. I learned long ago it’s pointless to have debates with unprepared people.

Also, if any writers out there would like to hire a last-minute proofreader to catch all the shit your previous editor(s) and proofreader(s) missed, I’m down. Beats the hell out of driving around Lafayette, Louisiana (and Breaux Bridge… and Carencro… and Abbeville… and Rayne) for six hours only to earn forty bucks if I’m lucky, let me tell YOU. My contact info is on this site. I won’t bite if you don’t.