George r.r. martin

George ‘R&R’ Martin takes it easy

Now that the Stranger Things disappointment has died down – slightly – George R.R. Martin and his merry band of Game of Thrones cohorts have recaptured attention in what we must call the Thrones universe. After the warily positive but underwhelming reception that the major spin-off House of the Dragon received, A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms’s six-episode offering is in a lower key than either of its forbears. No dragons, no enormous battles, no big stars, just a small-scale relationship drama focusing on the hapless “hedge knight” Ser Duncan the Tall, aka “Dunk” and his child squire, Egg, whose origins are rather less lowly.

george r.r. martin knight seven kingdoms

First came the dire wolf – the wooly mammoth is next

With all the insane news this week surrounding President Trump’s tariff and trade drama, only one non-political story was significant enough to break through the news cycle: a Texas-based company called Colossal Biosciences has bred three dire wolves and is currently keeping them in a secret 2,000-acre natural habitat somewhere in the United States. That’s right: dire wolves. An extinct species. A beast so mythical that we only really know of it from Game of Thrones. In fact, as we learned in an interview with a comic book magazine, Game of Thrones creator George R.R. Martin has even visited the dire wolf reserve. There is a non-AI-generated photo of him online cradling a dire wolf pup and weeping tears of joy.  Immediately, skepticism blew up online.