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In which we speculate on the true identity of a fictional character…
There is a scene in the first season of HBO’s Game of Thrones where Eddard Stark is perusing the Book of the Great Houses of Westeros and discovers that while all the Baratheon issue are “black of hair,” Joffrey, King Robert’s supposed son, is, like the Lannisters, “gold of hair.” That’s the point when Ned figures that Joffrey is in fact the issue of incest between Queen Cersei and her twin brother Jaime Lannister; it’s all down hill for Ned from there until the axe comes down on his neck in Episode 9. Oops.
Ann and I have been drilling into the back story of the TV series and the book, and have come to believe that one of the secrets buried in the story conceals the true identity of Jon Snow, he of black hair and the Night’s Watch.
Part of the back story is: Raeghar Targaryen – the son of the Mad King Aerys II Targaryen – abducted Ned Stark’s sister Lyanna, raped and impregnated her; these are among the circumstances that led to Robert’s Rebellion, the war that ended the nearly 300 year Targaryen dynasty and put Lord Robert of House Baratheon on the Iron Throne. After the rebellion, Ned finds his sister in Raeghar’s captivity, and she extracts a promise from him before she draws her last breath.
Nobody knows for sure what that promise was, but Ned returns shortly thereafter to Winterfell with a baby boy, much to the consternation of his wife Lady Catelyn, who assumes the boy is Ned’s bastard child by another woman and shuns the kid for his entire life. Ned never lets on that the child may be his nephew, not his son.
But if Jon Snow is the son of Raeghar Targaryen, shouldn’t his hair be platinum blonde like Danaerys? (OK, this is not advanced genetics theory, just work with me here…)
So here is our theory: that some how, in passages unwritten from before the books and series begins, Robert Baratheon and Lyanna Stark ‘hooked up,’ and the child she bore is the result of that liaison – and thus the child entitled to inherit Robert’s throne (not withstanding his still obvious bastard status, unless Robert and Lyanna were secretly married…)
Before they parted company in the first episode – Ned Stark on his way to King’s Landing to become the Hand of the King and Jon Snow on his way to The Wall to join The Night’s Watch – Jon asked Ned about his mother.
“We’ll talk about your mother when I return,” Ned says to Jon.
Unfortunately, Joffrey Baratheon’s sentence and Illyn Payne’s sword prevent that from every happening…
…is one of the three most-photographed medieval structures in all of Scotland. The others are Eilean Donan (maybe the most photographed castle in all of the UK), which we went by in the fall of 2012 on or way to the Isle of Skye, and Castle Stalker, which we… well, we missed it, even though we were standing on a vantage point about 100 yards away from where we would have seen it.
Kilchurn (it’s Scottish, so it’s pronounced “kil-hoon”) was built in about 1450 by Sir Colin Campbell, first Lord of Glenorchy, on a rocky peninsula at the northeastern end of Loch Awe, in Argyll and Bute, Scotland. We passed it on our last day in Argyll, as we headed back to Edinburgh for the last two days of our tour of Scotland.
I posted that (the subject header) to as a rather random, off-the-cuff comment to a Facebook thread started by my friend Craig Havighurst in response to his posting of the most recent screed from yet another singer-songwhiner about how the Internet is making paupers of his particular profession.
In the comments, I said,
I just re-read that headline, “…Songwriters Are Getting Screwed…” Well, excuse me, but why do songwriters think they’re some uniquely aggrieved class? We are ALL getting screwed, if learning to cope with a New Reality is your definition of getting screwed. And by “all,” I mean all of us, for example, who supply content – as we are doing right here – for the digital oligarchs. We are supplying the content and Facebook is getting the money. How is that not also getting “screwed?” Oh, this should be fun…
And then I realized that my comments were in fact stimulated by something I’d just read (heard, really, since I’m listening to the audiobook) in Jaron Lanier’s book, “Who Owns The Future” (which, credit where it is due, I am reading in part because Craig mentioned it to me last week):
The information economy that we are currently building doesn’t really embrace capitalism, but rather a new form of feudalism.
Full stop.
That would seem to explain a lot of things going on in my own life right now: from this obsession with medieval ruins to my devotion over the past couple of months to all things “Game of Thrones.”
It has been said often that when contemporary popular culture sets out to portray other periods in history, the narrative conveyed is more about the period in which the content is created and consumed than it is about the period being portrayed.
If that’s the case, then what on earth does a brutal, medieval fantasy like “Game of Thrones” tell us about the (evolving) digital world we’re living in now?
Could it be anything as simple as: “The new world is not a capitalist democracy, like we’re led to believe in our daily media/news stream; it’s a feudal oligarchy, in which we are all vassals and peasants.”
Consider: we all create content on a regular, fast and furious basis for sites like Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and Tumblr.” But as Lanier opines, all the value that is created in these enterprises rises to the owners of the “siren servers.”
How is this not like peasants working the land for Starks or the Lannisters? The nobles own the land, and we toil in the fields to create the wealth that maintains their estates, and they in turn promise to protect us by continuing to provide the service.
At the risk of violating every copyright law known to man and The Seven Gods (to say nothing of the God of Light…), I have taken the liberty of purloining an entire chapter from Jaron Lanier’s book to illustrate the point. Follow this link to read the chapter, which imagines what the End License User Agreement (EULA) might be like for a child opening a lemonade stand with “Streetbook” – an road-operating company that sounds a lot like an app store.
Follow the link, listen to the reasoning, and then tell me if this doesn’t sound downright “feudal”…
Watch that last step, it’s a doozy…
Hermitage Castle in @ScotBorders and @historicscotland – the place where it all started coming unraveled for Mary Queen of #Scots in 1565
What you’ll be seeing this week if you follow all the links in the digest (or just scroll down from the main page of the website) is mostly photos from an event that I covered on Sunday – the inaugural iteration of the Farmers Market at the Amqui Station, recently relocated to a park in Madison – the neighborhood locals like to call “Northeast Nashville” (because, you know, EAST Nashville is now SOooo hip and trendy… ).
My weapon of choice these days, the Olympus E-M1 with battery grip, 12-40 f/2.8 lens (24-70 equivalent) and built in WiFi.
The camera I’m using now – Olympus OM-D E-M1 – has its own built-in WiFi transceiver, which makes it really easy to send photos from the camera to my iPhone and then up to Instagram, Facebook, or whatever. During the event I sent about a dozen images to Instagram, and tagged them with “#blog” which also sends them to this website and posts them here.
The result is not ideal – I wind up with an individual blog post for each image that I send to Instagram. That in turn sends a glut of posts to my Facebook page, to the occasional annoyance of my Legion of Followers there.
Like everything in the digital world, it all works, sorta.
What I would really like is to have a tiled window sort of thing, maybe 6 images total, where the panels rotate to display different shots (kinda like my Instagram account looks when when you view it in a desktop browser) Then all you’d have to do is look at that one window for a few seconds and you’d see a bunch of the images in that one place without any additional effort. I haven’t quite found the app, plugin, or embed yet that will do that, so I’m stuck for now with individual posts and one image to each.
There are also a couple of images that I’ve siphoned out of the “Portals of Stone” collection and posted to Instagram… I guess I’m trying to see who else in the vast reaches of that universe might like to see images of medieval stone ruins cast against a modern deep-space sky. So far the reactions are very favorable but not exactly vast. I’ll keep plugging away at it…
