New HBO Game of Thrones trailer. By far the best one yet:

And if you haven’t listened yet, check out our interview with George R. R. Martin in Episode 22 of Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy.

Dammit. Just saw that Irvin Kershner, director of The Empire Strikes Back, has died. I took his screenwriting class at USC a few years ago. Really nice guy, and I doubt there was anything about movies that he didn’t know. He was also a good sport about answering all my Star Wars questions, when I’m sure he would have rather been talking about Ingmar Bergman.

Via John Joseph Adams:

I’m editing another anthology of reprint fiction for Night Shade Books, this time focused on Cthulhu/Mythos fiction. It will be called The Book of Cthulhu and will be released sometime next fall. As I’ve done with most of my other anthologies, I’d like to solicit recommendations, so if you have any outstanding examples of Cthulhu fiction you’d to point out to me, please feel free to let me know about them by entering them into my Cthulhu/Mythos Fiction Database.

HBO has launched a new video podcast for A Game of Thrones with featurettes about the upcoming series.

Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy is listed as one of the Top 10 Favorite Podcasts over at the Pansentient League. The SF Signal Podcast also made the list.

Here’s a great panel discussion. The Seattle Geekly podcast presents Retrospective on Roleplaying:

This last year saw the loss of Gary Gygax, Dave Arneson, and Erick Wujcik, three of the founding fathers of the RPG hobby. What were their contributions and how did roleplaying become what it is today?

In this panel, recorded Saturday August 8 at Dragonflight 2009, gaming luminaries Peter Adkison, the founder and first CEO of Wizards of the Coast, Tim Beach, who contributed material to virtually all of TSR’s campaign settings in the 1990s, Skaff Elias, the original VP of R&D for Magic: The Gathering, and Jonathan Tweet, one of the lead designers for the 3.0 edition of Dungeons & Dragons, discuss the past and future of the hobby.

Christie Yant, who has assisted us mightily with the Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast, just had her first published story, “The Magician and the Maid and Other Stories,” picked by Rich Horton for his Year’s Best Science Fiction and Fantasy, 2011 Edition. The story, which appears in the John Joseph Adams anthology The Way of the Wizard, is free to read online. Congrats!

io9 has decided to run Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy Episode 25 tomorrow rather than today, so as not to have a bunch of big features all come out at the same time, but never fear, the show is ready to go and will be appearing on Thursday. (In this episode we interview Robert Kirkman about his graphic novel series The Walking Dead, basis for the new hit show on AMC.)

Just saw that Myke Cole, who I know from back in the day when he was an assistant at Weird Tales, has sold his fantasy novel Latent to Penguin Putnam in a 3-book deal. I ran into Myke this year at New York Comic Con, where he described the book as “military contractors who are also sorcerers.” (Myke has been on the ground in Afghanistan working as a military contractor.)

This is fascinating. The Skeptoid podcast takes a critical look at “speed reading.”