Donna Summer

May 17th, 2012

Donna Summer just passed away at age 63, following a battle with cancer.

The Queen of Disco was born into a devoutly Christian family and began singing in church at a young age — when her name was still LaDonna Adrian Gaines.

Donna Summer was the stage name she took after she moved to Munich and married Austrian actor Helmuth Sommer — and had a child and divorced him for German artist Peter Mühldorfer.

Her breakout hit was one of the first extended dance club remixes, a 17-minute version of “Love to love you baby” — made infamous by Summer’s moaning. The shorter radio mix climbed the charts in 1976.

She later renounced her disco lifestyle and became a born-again Christian.

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Lord of Light by Roger Zelazny

May 17th, 2012

Roger Zelazny’s Lord of Light won the Hugo in 1968 and almost became a big-budget Hollywood movie a decade later, after Star Wars paved the way — but even though it didn’t get made, it still made history:

In 1979, a $50 million film version of Lord of Light was announced. The plan to make a movie collapsed due to various legal issues, but the CIA acquired some set designs and parts of the script, and used them to set up a cover for a team sent to Tehran — ostensibly scouting shooting locations, but really to help rescue six members of the US embassy staff who had narrowly missed being held prisoner during the Iranian hostage crisis because they had been out of the building at the time. These half-dozen people were in hiding in the Canadian embassy, and the Lord of Light pretext contributed to the CIA bring them safely out of the country.

I’m not sure I’d choose a script with this premise for my cover while traveling into revolutionary Iran:

The plot is simple enough. A group of tough characters have acquired some radical technology, and they use it to set themselves up on a colonized planet as quasi-deities modeled on the divine figures of Hinduism. But one breaks away, reinventing himself as a Buddhist alternative, taking on the guise of Siddhartha, and thus undermining the more rough-and-tumble philosophy of his rivals.

The book opens: “His followers called him Mahasamatman and said he was a god. He preferred to drop the Maha- and the -atman, however, and called himself Sam. He never claimed to be a god, but then he never claimed not to be a god.”

(I somehow forgot that Wired had a piece on the escape a few years ago.)

Posted in Media, War | 1 Comment »

Stay unmassive, Allyson

May 17th, 2012

To Steve Sailer, the most interesting storyline going into the 2012 Olympics is whether the American long sprinter Allyson Felix will finally give in and go over to the dark side in her pursuit of individual gold:

She had to settle in 2004 and 2008 for silver medals in the 200m, losing each time to Jamaican women with biceps twice the diameter of hers.

Felix is the 21st Century black female version of the old Chariots of Fire Olympians: a well-spoken minister’s daughter from the nice middle class black suburb of L.A.. She’s just really fast. She turned professional right out of high school, so she couldn’t run college track, but still got her U.S.C. degree quickly. It’s easy to picture her as a high school principal some day. Corporate America would love to give her lots of money, if she’d only win individual gold. So, I imagine, there’s a lot of pressure on her to Do What It Takes. Americans love a winner.

And, at the 2011 world championship (pictured above), Allyson lost in the 400m by 0.03 seconds to a Botswanan with massive biceps.

[...]

I went to the 1984 Olympics at the L.A. Coliseum and saw an NFL receiver’s wife with massive arms edge out a skinny Florence Griffith-Joyner for gold in the 200m. Then Flo-Jo lost the 1987 world championships to an East German with big arms. So, she showed up in 1988 looking like Wonder Woman, and set all the records, which still stand. She died in 1998.

Allyson has actually been training for years under Bear Ross, who describes the Holy Grail of Speed Training as increasing mass-specific force — or getting stronger without adding bulk. He recommends a program built around deadlifts and plyos:

The key to this workout’s effectiveness? TIME.

What was timed? The rest period between sets is exactly 5 minutes allowing up to 90% or more ATP regeneration. The benefit is much more rapid strength gain. By keeping sets and reps low, timed and without lifts to failure, lactic acid was minimal or non-existent. The benefit was that the athletes felt exhilarated and ready for a full event workout after lifting.

Great, but does it work…

In September of 2002, we began high school sprinter Allyson Felix’s final assault on Marion Jones’ national high school 200-meter record. At the time, Allyson weighed 121 lbs. She had improved at a rate of ½ second or better the two previous years so we were not expecting anywhere near that improvement rate in 2002. When you’re already under 23 seconds in the 200 meters an additional half-second drop in time in a single season is incredible.

Allyson, and the other athletes we trained, began the new training protocol in September. Allyson’s previous best deadlift was 125 lbs, primarily because we did not focus on that lift in the past.

Allyson increased September’s 125 lbs deadlift to 270 lbs in mid April (as witnessed by Tim Layden of Sports Illustrated) and to an estimated 300 lbs by June. Her body weight increased a paltry 2 pounds from 121 lbs to 123 lbs. Meanwhile, her 200-meter sprint time dropped from 22.83 in 2003 to 22.11 in 2004 (adjusted to 22.30 for altitude, a ½ second or better gain!). She had run the fastest 200 meters in the world (without resorting to drugs) for all women.

Right about now you may be thinking that Allyson Felix is a gifted athlete and that this is not good proof of the effectiveness of the workout.

Sure, Allyson’s tremendous natural talent allowed for eye-popping times, but ALL of her teammates showed significant reductions in time for sprints, as did the athletes of other sports doing the same workout. They also showed as large or larger increases in strength both in actual pounds and percentages.

One of Allyson’s sprint partners increased from 85 lbs to 215 lbs in the deadlift over the same time period yet increased her body weight from 98 pounds to 100 pounds. She had shown little improvement in her hurdle times over the previous 2 years but improved dramatically in 2003. Her best time in the 300 hurdles in 2001 was 46.67. In 2002 her time regressed to 46.83. In 2003, using the workout described above, she won the California Southern Section Division IV 300 meter hurdle championship in 45.88. This was a big improvement for someone who had been running competitively for at least 7 years. Soccer players had equivalent gains as did athletes in baseball and other sports.

Peter Weyand’s study has not been universally accepted by the coaching elite. Some may not trust the study because it challenges long-held concepts of what makes people run faster or it runs counter to what they think they see. Others may feel there is no way to adjust training to fit the study. From our experience, neither could be further from the truth!

Posted in Fitness | 1 Comment »

A Resolute Nation

May 16th, 2012

In the 1960s, what percentage of Americans believed the Apollo program was worth the expense?

Seventy percent? Eighty percent?

In reality, it was less than 50 percent.

Erik Conway, historian at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., explains: “The Apollo program only had a majority public support — over 51 percent — for the few months around the 1969 moon landing. That’s it. Otherwise, it was less than 50 percent.” In a 1969 opinion poll taken after the lunar landing, just 53 percent of American adults believed that the moon excursion was worth the expense. In fact, during the nine years of the Apollo program, American support pretty much fluctuated between 35 percent and 45 percent.

In a 2005 paper, Roger Launius, chief historian at NASA, wrote, “While there may be many myths about Apollo and spaceflight, the principal one is the story of a resolute nation moving outward into the unknown beyond Earth.” Nostalgia for the Space Age is rooted more in The Jetsons than in reality.

(Hat tip to Winchell Chung.)

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Buying Olympic Gold with Visa

May 16th, 2012

Americans no longer dominate the Olympics, but the top three decathletes are all Americans — apparently because of a little decision by Visa years ago:

For nearly a decade, the credit-card giant Visa provided funding for the U.S. decathlon team. But in a demonstration of how far a modest amount can go, that funding ended nearly 13 years ago and never added up to a fortune. “It really was almost a rounding error in our budget,” said John Bennett, a retired Visa marketing executive who has been hailed as “the Godfather” of American decathlon.

[...]

But this decline [after Bruce Jenner's 1976 win] bothered many in track circles, particularly Fred Samara, a former Olympic decathlete and the men’s track-and-field coach at Princeton. Along with fellow decathlete coach Harry Marra, Samara began knocking on corporate doors in search of funding. “We beat the bushes,” said Samara. “I mean, it was a long succession of pitches that didn’t go anywhere” — until they approached Visa. As an international Olympic sponsor, Visa was already spending $40 million on the Games. But Bennett, its marketing honcho, was intrigued. “I said, ‘Well, what do you need?’” Bennett recalled.

They created the USA-Visa Decathlon team, granting membership to the top-10 finishers at the annual national championships. Each athlete would receive a monthly stipend ranging from roughly $300 to $900, and the entire team would convene twice a year for national training camps, where they would receive top level-coaching. The entire program would cost just $200,000 per year.

Launched in 1990, the team recorded progress in 1992, when Dave Johnson secured America’s first decathlon medal in 16 years by taking a bronze. Four years later, Dan O’Brien broke a 20-year gold drought by finishing first at the Atlanta Games. America hasn’t gone without a decathlon medal since.

The Visa program ended in 2000, not long after Bennett retired. But its influence remains evident. Clay, the defending Olympic champion, attended Visa’s developmental programs as a youngster. At 32, Clay is hoping to become the first decathlete to win medals at three Olympic Games. “I would love to own that piece of history,” he said.

Eaton is coached by Marra, the cofounder of the Visa team. A three-time NCAA champion at the University of Oregon, Eaton is hoping at age 24 to win a spot at his first Olympics. And Hardee, who has posted two of the top three scores in the world since the Beijing Games, is coached by Mario Sategna, who competed as a member of the Visa team. Hardee, 28, was holding down fourth place in Beijing until he bonked the pole vault.

At the University of Arkansas, meanwhile, is a young hotshot named Gunnar Nixon — a freshman who holds the national high-school decathlon record. His coach studied under Kip Janvrin, who once starred on the Visa team. Marra said he considers Nixon to be a “third generation” product of the Visa program. “It’s heartwarming to see what we started still going forward,” said Marra.

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How Ferragamo Remade the Shoe Industry

May 16th, 2012

Salvatore Ferragamo first made his name by developing comfortable, attractive, period-appropriate cowboy boots for Hollywood:

“The West would have been conquered earlier if they had had boots like these,” said director Cecil B. DeMille.

Then he developed the arch:

He enrolled at the University of Southern California, in Los Angeles, to study anatomy.

There, Ferragamo tested his theories about weight distribution and the human skeleton. And he realized that he, like everyone else, was making shoes wrong. By measuring the foot while flat, they were creating shoes that supported the ball and the heel only. But human feet, when they are wearing shoes, need arch support. Ferragamo began building it into his shoes, and suddenly his customers began telling him he made them the most comfortable shoes they’d ever worn.

After establishing a successful shoe shop in Los Angeles, he went back to Italy:

Over the years, to increase his inventory, he had begun to sell some machine-made footwear — made on his own arch-friendly lasts — but had never been satisfied with the quality of the shoes. He began to wonder why the factory model couldn’t be applied to handmade shoes. In Italy, where labor was cheaper than in America and shoemaking a more widespread artisanal craft, he could hire other cobblers to work for him, creating an assembly line on which every stage of manufacture would be touched by human hands.

Italian shoemakers weren’t won over easily, however. Ferragamo went first to Naples, where the cobblers laughed at his proposal. He tried Rome, Milan, Turin, Venice and Padua with no luck. Finally, he settled in Florence, all but bribing shoemakers to work for him by offering the highest wages around. With 60 men in his employ, Salvatore designed an 18-shoe collection. Then, after sailing back to New York, he invited the city’s top department-store buyers to his room at the Roosevelt Hotel to see his new shoes.

George Miller of the I. Miller department store was first to arrive. “You have nothing, nothing!” he proclaimed. “Go back to Hollywood.”

Ferragamo then called Manuel Gerton of Saks Fifth Avenue and braced himself.

Gerton was in a rush, but Ferragamo could see that his eyes were alight. “You have done something new, Salvatore,” he said. “You keep these shoes away from everyone. I want them.”

And so Ferragamos became the first Italian shoes ever to be exported and sold internationally.

The Great Depression and sanctions imposed on Italy almost killed his business. Then he developed the wedge.

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How Unhip Amazon Can Walk the Fashion Runway

May 15th, 2012

How can a middle-brow company like Amazon become a credible source of fashion rather than merely apparel? Virginia Postrel offers a few suggestions:

Emphasize that you are providing a large market, rather than a mass market.

Mass markets spread the fixed cost of producing the same good over a lot of different buyers. They tend toward homogeneity and one-size-fits-all products. Large markets simply have a lot of people in them. A large population can transform a formerly unprofitable niche into a profitable market. The bigger the market, the more varied the goods. That’s why you find more variety in New York than in Kansas City.

The big advantage an online retailer like Amazon offers a fashion house is the chance to bring together all the potential customers scattered outside the largest cities. At the pricey end, at least, Amazon is not looking for a mass market. It is creating a large one — making room for many more niche brands and potentially for a given brand’s full line of styles. Success doesn’t depend on dumbing down fashion. And selection, not low prices, is the killer app.

Don’t be Macy’s when you can be Bloomingdale’s.

Macy’s Inc. owns both department stores, but Bloomingdale’s Inc. carries more expensive, exclusive fashion brands. Amazon’s primary site competes with middle-market Macy’s. It needs a different brand to compete with Bloomingdale’s. That could be MyHabit, its existing upscale flash-sale site, or it could be something new.

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Falling into the Hands of the Rat People

May 15th, 2012

Matt Ridley shares a “gorgeous little juxtaposition of tales” from Dario Maestripieri’s new book:

Generally, junior professors write long and unsolicited emails to senior professors, who reply with short ones after a delay; the juniors then reply quickly and at length. This is not because the seniors are busier, for they, too, write longer and more punctually when addressing their deans and funders, who reply more briefly and tardily. The asymmetry in length and speed of reply correlates with dominance.

When a subordinate chimpanzee grooms a dominant one, it often does so for a long time and unsolicited. When it then requests to be groomed in turn, it receives only a brief grooming and usually after having to ask a second time.

Maestripieri is a professor and a primatologist (and a primate), and his book explores the Games Primates Play:

He observes two university colleagues in a coffee shop and notes how the senior one takes the chair with the back to the wall (the better to spot attacks by rivals or leopards), is less attentive to her colleague’s remarks than vice versa, stares down her colleague when a contentious issue comes up and takes the lead on walking out the door at the end — all of it neatly corresponding to the behavior of two baboons when one is dominant.

(A new member of a committee on which I served once asked me why a senior colleague was being so horrible to him. I replied: “Oh, it’s because when a new male baboon joins a troop, it’s traditional for the alpha male to beat him up before becoming his best friend-soon he’ll think the world of you.” I was right.)

Dr. Maestripieri’s most intriguing chapter is entitled “Cooperate in the Spotlight, Compete in the Dark.” He describes how people, like monkeys, can be angels of generosity when all eyes are on them, but devils of spite in private. Famously, the citizens of New York City turned to crime when the lights went out in the blackout of July 13, 1977 — not because they were evil but because the cost-benefit calculus was altered by the darkness.

Dr. Maestripieri then offers a fascinating analysis of the conundrum of peer review in science. Peer review is asymmetric: The author’s name is known, but the reviewers remain anonymous. This is to prevent reciprocal cooperation (or “pal review”): I’ll be nice about your paper if you’re nice about mine.

In this it partly works, though academics often drop private hints to each other to show that they have done review favors. But peer review is plagued by the opposite problem — spiteful criticism to prevent competitors from getting funded or published. Like criminals in a blackout, anonymous reviewers, in the book’s words, “loot the intellectual property of the authors whose work they review” (by delaying publication while pinching the ideas for their own projects) and “damage or destroy the reviewed authors’ property” (by denying their competitors grants and publications).

Studies show that peer reviewers are motivated by tribal as well as individual rivalry. Says Dr. Maestripieri: “I am a Monkey-Man, and when I submit a grant application for peer review, I am terrified that it might fall into the hands of the Rat-People. They want to exterminate all of us… (because our animals are cooler than theirs).”

His answer (and it applies to far more fields than science) is total transparency with the help of the Internet. The more light you shine, the less crime primates commit. Once everybody can see who’s reviewing whose papers and grant applications, then not only will spite decline, but so will nepotism and reciprocity. Anonymity alters the cost-benefit balance in favor of competition; transparency alters it in favor of cooperation.

Posted in Animals, Crime, Economics, Policy, Science | 1 Comment »

Leuckart’s Law

May 14th, 2012

Larger animals tend to have larger eyes, but faster animals tend to have larger eyes too:

“If you can think of mammals that are fast like a cheetah or horse, you can almost guarantee they’ve got really big eyes,” says Kirk. “This gives them better vision to avoid colliding with obstacles in their environment when they’re moving very quickly.”

Kirk and physical anthropology doctoral student Amber Heard-Booth are the first to apply Leuckart’s Law — a hypothesis that was developed specifically for birds and speed of flight — to 50 species of mammals. The paper is forthcoming in the journal Anatomical Record. Heard-Booth presented the findings at the 2011 American Association of Physical Anthropology Meeting, where she was awarded the Mildred Trotter Prize for exceptional graduate research in evolutionary morphology.

Previously it was thought that the time of day that an animal is active (nocturnal or diurnal) would be the main factor driving the evolution of mammalian eye size. However, comparative research on the anatomy of the eye has shown that although nocturnal and diurnal species differ in eye shape, they often have similar eye sizes. Although nocturnal species may appear to have bigger eyes because more of the cornea is exposed to let in more light, activity pattern only has a modest effect on eye size.
By comparison, body mass plus maximum running speed together can explain 89 percent of the variation in eye size among mammals.

The researchers controlled for body size and evolutionary relationships, and found that the relationship between eye diameter and maximum running speed is stronger than the relationship between body mass and running speed.

Posted in Animals, Science | 1 Comment »

Audience With The King Of Space

May 13th, 2012

I haven’t played Eve Online, but this interview with the head of the so-called Goon Fleet dips into political philosophy and the nature of leadership:

Autocracy is the most effective form of government in null sec [the enormous sections of space within Eve Online with no AI police, where players rule themselves]. Council systems don’t work very well.

[...]

Democracy is death. In a situation where you need to be able to respond quickly and with force to strategic problems, invasions or what have you, you can’t wait for a vote.

[...]

Eve is a fascinating social sandbox. People with the ability to bind people to them are rare in real life, and they are in Eve as well. One of the scariest moments for me in Eve was during our most recent campaign, the Fountain Campaign. We’d created this coalition called The Clusterfuck, and I was set to give this speech. Occasionally we do this, and we call it the State of the Goonion and it gets four hundred or five hundred people on Teamspeak. So I gave a speech and welcoming the Clusterfuck, and found one thousand, two hundred and seventy humans had tuned in to hear me talk about a bad game. And then we went off to break up the alliance we were at war with.

You can’t kill an alliance unless you break up the social bonds that hold it together. Espionage is only ever a means to an end to induce a failure cascade.

When things get bad, when an alliance starts losing enough that they stop logging in, when they start blaming each other and they start internalising their failures, then you start seeing “the graph”. An alliance goes into failure cascade when its capabilities have been degraded to the point that one failure piles on top of another, and they start shedding corporations, because rather than identifying with the alliance the pilots say “Well, I’m still a proud member of my corporation”, and then one corp goes its seperate ways. And if one corp stops showing up on operations, everyone else says “What the fuck is with these people?” And it becomes a circular firing squad.

During the Great Wars 1 and 2 we had destroyed Band of Brothers and taken their space, but they were still a cohesive social force and simply reformed. It was only most recently during the Fountain campaign that they went into true failure cascade, and are now three or four different alliances which hate each other’s guts now. Which is great!

Failure cascades just fascinate me. That’s why I play the game, really — to tear social groups apart. That’s the stuff that’s interesting about Eve. The political and social dimensions. Not the brackets shooting brackets shit. That’s why we say Eve is a bad game.

[...]

I used to actually be a very bad leader. Many years ago Remedial – the guy now facing 25 million dollars in fines  —  retired and made me CEO against my will, and I failed spectacularly. I listened to too many people and tried to poll my membership for what I should do, and it was a disaster. I handed leadership over to somebody who knew what they were doing and the organisation was much better for it.

Later, after watching so many failure cascades, I saw some commonalities in what made good and bad leaders. Through my spy network and watching the mistakes of others I developed into what I would call a good leader.

It’s essentially about delegation. People will show up and be good leaders, but they’ll try and do everything, then they’ll burn out, disappear and their alliance dies. For example, in Goonswarm we have a team structure. I’m the autocrat, but we have a finance team, a fleet commander team, a logistics team and so on, and these teams don’t have heads. These teams simply work together to solve common problems, and that removes single person dependencies which are a huge problem in alliances.

In some ways, it’s a lot more complicated than running a small business. Most small businesses are between a hundred and two hundred employees, or less. We run an organisation of six thousand people in a coalition of ten thousand.

[...]

The purpose of the autocrat is to essentially let the people who are experts do their jobs, make large strategic decisions and be a figurehead, but a lot of it’s just human resources work. Resolving disputes, hiring good people, firing bad people.

I don’t know shit about logisitics, I’m not a fleet commander — I’ve got spying down, but I’m just a leader. I’ve got the charisma. Micromanaging is death. It leaves you with good people wondering why the fuck some asshole is telling them how to run a logistics chain or what ships to use in the fleet they’re composing. A lot of other autocrats meddle too much.

(Hat tip to Buckethead.)

Posted in Business, Games, Policy | No Comments »

Fritz Leiber

May 12th, 2012

Fritz Leiber’s life story was almost as strange and wondrous as those he concocted for his books, Ted Gioia says:

At one point or another in his life he was a movie actor (you can see Fritz Leiber working with Greta Garbo in Camille), chess champion, board game inventor, comic strip writer (for the Buck Rogers series), editor of an encyclopedia, minister, student of psychology, student of philosophy, student of theology, writing teacher, Shakespearian stage actor, inspector for the aerospace industry, skilled fencer, speech instructor (at Occidental College in Los Angeles) and, of course, science fiction and fantasy author. Despite these considerable talents, Leiber spent his final years in humble surroundings, residing in a one-room apartment in San Francisco’s tenderloin district. Harlan Ellison has described Leiber writing his stories on a manual typewriter propped over the sink in his cramped quarters.

Leiber drew on his odd hodgepodge of skills and personal experiences in crafting his stories. His considerable skills as a chessplayer — Leiber won the Santa Monica open in 1958 — are reflected in a number of tales, perhaps most notably in “The 64 Square Madhouse,” which presents the extraordinary concept (at least back in 1964, when it was published) of a computer entering a chess tournament. Leiber’s deep knowledge of Shakespeare — he played Malcolm in Macbeth and Edgar in King Lear — shows up in countless stories, for example “No Great Magic” which features an acting troupe that, through the wonders of time travel, performs Macbeth for Queen Elizabeth I and the Bard of Avon himself. Leiber’s brief stint as a minister is reflected in the religious themes of various tales — he credited it as an aid in writing Gather Darkness, although his teachers at the General Theological Seminary would not have been pleased with the practitioners of witchcraft serving as heroes and the priests playing villains in this novel. And, of course, Leiber’s talents as a fencer are echoed again and again in his adventure stories, especially those featuring Fafhrd and Gray Mouser, the former character modeled after the author himself.

Posted in Media | 1 Comment »

Game of Thrones on Track to be Most Pirated Show of 2012

May 11th, 2012

Game of Thrones is on track to be the most pirated show of 2012:

Approximately 25-million times have people decided to pay the iron price for the show, and as the comments on Reddit attest, it’s often because the gold price wasn’t even an option.

(So, The Oatmeal was right.)

Posted in Business, Media | 1 Comment »

Comic-Book Heroes Magazine Covers

May 11th, 2012

Des Taylor has produced these Life-like magazine covers featuring comic-book heroes:

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Four Ways

May 10th, 2012

In his youth, Ted Gioia determined that there were exactly four ways that a contemporary novel could earn adulation from the literary establishment:

First, the novel could make its mark for its experimental excesses, and, in this case, the more difficult and insufferable the reader found the work, the more likely that it was a masterpiece.

Second, the novelist could earn acclaim for a work, or even an entire oeuvre, by leading a lifestyle that was sufficiently bohemian, drug and alcohol ravaged or otherwise transgressive — think of Norman Mailer stabbing his wife, Ken Kesey ingesting massive quantities of LSD, etc.

Third, a novelist could hit it out of the park by addressing a pressing social issue, employing fiction as a tool of advocacy for some righteous cause — a good book was a book that did good.

Finally, if all else failed, a writer could take the path of Portnoy’s Complaint, Lolita and Updike’s collected works by mixing in dizzying doses of sex, preferably excluding the standard missionary position between husband and wife, and ideally leading to a book burning, obscenity charges from a D.A. in a southern state or, at a minimum, outraged parents demanding a novel’s removal from a school library.

Those were the four recipes. No others existed, as far as I could see. And if following them was still no guarantee of literary acclaim, certainly ignoring all four of them was a sure predictor of perdition.

Posted in Media | 1 Comment »

I tried to watch Game of Thrones, and this is what happened

May 9th, 2012

I don’t regularly read The Oatmeal, but this “I tried to watch Game of Thrones, and this is what happened” strip is far too accurate:

(Hat tip to Gabriel Rossman, who asks, What’s HBO Go’s problem? And, if I may reiterate, you’re not really paying for all the channels you don’t watch.)

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