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May the Fourth be with you!

Huh? This is where I thought you meant Benjen But yeah, we can agree it's bullshit that that wight wasn't able to get out. I assumed he was chained up, but he wasn't when the lid was popped off

@Bluewolf Episode 5 of Warrior is out! A very light spoiler - IT'S A WESTERN!!! Loved it. Definitely my most favourite episode so far.

The walls of Winterfell weren't ice to be fair but that is pretty nit picky nonetheless. I know it's just a meme but others have made that a genuine complaint. At least those instances were in keeping with his character. He wasn't so much ignorant as Lord Commander, more that he failed to convince the rest of the Watch that what he did was absolutely necessary. The emotional charge at Ramsay is excusable, he did literally just see Rickon get murdered feet away from him after already had the discipline to stay at the Wall when Ned and Robb died, and when he knew Bran had gone Beyond the Wall. On that occasion I don't blame him for going fuck it, I'm done with this shit. His idiotic tactics in the latest episode were a symptom of the overall weird writing so should be treated as a separate entity in my opinion.

Balon is back in town, Balon in back in town. @SirBalon

Nasa instrument heads to space station to map CO2 Nasa has sent up an instrument to the International Space Station (ISS) to help track carbon dioxide on Earth. OCO-3, as the observer is called, was launched on a Falcon rocket from Florida in the early hours of Saturday. The instrument is made from the spare components left over after the assembly of a satellite, OCO-2, which was put in orbit to do the same job in 2014. The data from two missions should give scientists a clearer idea of how CO2 moves through the atmosphere. One way this will be achieved is through the different perspectives OCO-2 and OCO-3 will get. The former flies around the entire globe in what's termed a sun-synchronous polar orbit, which leads to it seeing any given location at the same time of day. The latter, on the other hand, because it will fly aboard the station, will only see locations up to 51 degrees North and South; and see them at many different times of the day. That's interesting because plants' ability to absorb CO2 varies during the course of daylight hours. OCO-3's dataset will, therefore, have much to add to that of its predecessor. "Getting this different time of day information from the orbit of the space station is going to be really valuable," Nasa project scientist Dr Annmarie Eldering told BBC News. "We have a lot of good arguments about diurnal variability: plants' performance over different times of day; what possibly could we learn? So, I think that's going to be exciting scientifically." The Orbiting Carbon Observatory (OCO) missions are trying to tie down the uncertainties in the cycling of CO2 - how and where the greenhouse gas is emitted (sources), versus how and where it's absorbed (sinks). Humans are driving an imbalance in this cycle, increasing the concentration of the gas in the air. Currently, anthropogenic activities pump out just under 40 billion tonnes of CO2 year-on-year, principally from the burning of fossil fuels. Only about half of this sum stays in the atmosphere, where it adds to warming About half of the other half is absorbed into the ocean, with the remainder pulled down into land "sinks". But these "budgets" are imperfectly characterised. Some sizeable sources and sinks - both human and natural - need a fuller description. The OCO instruments incorporate spectrometers that break the sunlight reflected off the Earth's surface into its constituent colours, and then analyse the spectrum to determine how much carbon dioxide is present. The analysis of the data is complex because it requires the use of models to explain how the gas is mixed through the atmosphere. The space station instrument brings a new trick to the OCO observations - a swivelling mirror system that allows the spectrometer system to scan a much wider swath of the Earth's surface than would ordinarily be the case. This snapshot mode means CO2 maps can be built up in a single pass over a target of special interest such as a megacity - a task that will take OCO-2 several days. "The snapshot mode allows us to grab snippets of data over an area of about 80km by 80km in two minutes. Right now we think we may spend about a quarter of our time making these mini maps, up to 100 a day," Dr Eldering said. OCO-3 will be positioned on the Japanese segment of the space station. Its mission lifetime is pretty fixed at three years, therefore. That's because the berth it is taking up on the observation platform is already booked for a future instrument. Carbon monitoring will, however, see many more satellite systems launched in the coming years. Europe is planning a constellation of observers in its Sentinel series that will map CO2 over a much wider area than OCO, but still with the same high precision. This orbiting network would even make it possible to police individual countries' commitments to reduce carbon emissions under international agreements such as the Paris climate accord of 2015. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-48150645

Someone, we know on here might ask you "Any pics? did she have lovely feet?"

Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile. 8/10 Worth a watch. Better than I anticipated. Zac Efon’s portrayal of Ted Bundy looks to be his best performance yet. @LFCMike

She trained with Jaqen H'ghar for almost 2 years. I felt it did. He was so used to having his way, ether by manipulating or his cunning ploys, that he didn't now how to react when it all fell apart.

I don't even care about who killed the Night King because what happened makes sense. Like that above video describes though, there was absolutely stupid decision making left right and centre that was deliberately done to allow main characters to get into hopelessly dangerous situations which they repeatedly got out of by cutting to a new shot and just letting the superhuman wight-repelling kill streak happen off screen. A couple of 'this character is covered by 7 wights' moments in an episode is forgivable but it happened a foolish amount and they were blatantly lazy about explaining it and just hoped the entire audience lack the critical capacity to go wait a minute how did that happen and instead just get overawed by the spectacle and the ooooooh aaaaaah moments. Game of Thrones is this popular in the first place because they spent years doing the exact opposite. Compare it to other major battles which have spent entire seasons building up to key battles with believable tactics. Tyrion's wildfire plot in season two for Battle of Blackwater and Varys providing him with the map of secret tunnels which they used to turn the battle, sending the group of wildlings over the wall to attack Castle Black from the South in Watchers on the Wall, Hardhome didn't have as much build up but was absolutely epic, terrifying as fuck at the start and the right mix of chaos but you know what's actually happening to key characters. You didn't see Jon Snow get surrounded by 6 wights at Hardhome for them to cut away to Tormund for a bit and then back to Jon who was suddenly inexplicably fine. At the Battle of the Bastards they obviously wanted to have that shot of Jon facing down the Bolton cavalry so they used Rickon to get him out there in believable fashion. They wanted the shot of Sansa and Littlefinger saving the day so they had Jon and his army get surrounded in believable fashion, using real battle tactics, so it was fine. This time we just get two seasons of everyone making a massive deal over getting all of the armies to combine so that they can send the Dothraki on an inexplicable suicide run into the black of night just for the spectacle of the lit up arakhs flying across the field and the chilling scene of the lights going out in the distance. Cool at the time but ultimately totally illogical from a tactical perspective, and then they sacrifice the entire Unsullied army so that they can retreat to the castle. So much for Dany spending 6 years building up her forces. People wouldn't mind as much if they'd gone to the effort to write a plot where the Dothraki charge and the sacrifice of the entire Unsullied army was somehow a sensible thing to do or forced upon the army of the living but they just couldn't be arsed because they think it's enough to give the audience a shot of the flaming Dothraki army flying across the field because "ooh shiny". The other battles had occasions of bullshit in them too, such as Tyrion sprinting at the front of his army when his legs are half the length of the men behind him in Blackwater, Jon conveniently getting left to mourn and not getting stabbed to fuck when Ygritte is dying in his arms, and when he somehow has the reflexes to block the arrows Ramsay Bolton fired at him from point blank range with a wooden shield but when you have small bits like that in an otherwise immense battle sequence, you can say, that's just TV. When it takes up half of the episode in what should have been the battle that topped the absolute lot, people aren't going to enjoy it. That said, I'm only trying to get people to see why others didn't think it was that good. I still enjoyed it, I'm not saying it was "terrible" or "embarrassing" or "ruined Game of Thrones" but when they've set the bar so high with previous battles and had this one built up as the biggest of the lot since the first episode of season one and it doesn't quite hit the heights, people are going to be disappointed. Some people have been reading these books since 23 years ago and this is the first climax they've seen, I it didn't live up to what they were hoping for, they have every right to express their disappointment.