12 Bits of TV and Movie Trivia to Peruse During the Next Commercial Break

Instead of working on The Winds of Winter, GRRM wrote up a whole long blog post about where House of the Dragon Season Two strayed from the source material. HBO is in the midst of trying to keep its cool, so far just saying, “The showrunner ultimately is required to make difficult choices.”

You can buy everything from Jon Snow’s Valyrian steel sword to Jaime Lannisters gold hand to the infamous “shame bell.”

Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry got elbowed out of the production of the sequel to his 1979 movie, so he tried to kill it by leaking spoilers. It went on to become possibly the most beloved film in the franchise.

Ohtani brought out his dog, Decoy (a sound-alike for the Japanese word for playfully flicking someone’s forehead), to run the ball from the pitcher’s mound to home plate while wearing a doggy Dodgers jersey.

The stadium gave out golden bobbleheads of Ohtani holding Decoy, which are now selling on eBay for $20,000.

Sylvester McCoy, who played the seventh Doctor, is sick of people saying the franchise has gone woke. He’s responded to critics, saying, “In the ‘60s, I got hooked on Doctor Who, and the reason why was because of the politics in it. It’s always been political, as far as I’m concerned.”

After spending $100 million to develop the PlayStation game Concord, Sony only managed to sell about 25,000 copies. It peaked at 697 concurrent players on Steam, which is orders of magnitude lower than other games that were considered colossal failures. Instead of marketing or improving the game, Sony is killing it and refunding the few people who bought it.

In its ongoing efforts to hit you over the head with the time period it takes place in, Stranger Things has teamed up with Polly Pocket to release a legitimately pretty cool pocket-sized playset shaped like a walkie-talkie. It’s got all the kids, their bikes and a Demogorgon, and has scenes from both Hawkins and the Upside-Down.

Rolling Stone says it’s a Season Five episode of Breaking Bad. We say it’s that episode of Barney where the kids learn that you can chase away a thunderstorm by making a thunderstorm in your classroom. Agree to disagree.

The once-popular organization behind National Novel Writing Month, which encouraged writers to complete their novels every November, released a statement saying that using A.I. to write novels is totally cool, and condemning that technology is somehow ableist and classist. Disabled writers have come out to say: What the fuck are you talking about?

Amid speculation that Elizabeth Olsen hated playing Scarlet Witch, she’s said, “We really felt we were Marvel’s weird cousin,” but clarified that “I have made a choice to continue on with Marvel, and they’ve made a choice to continue on with me.”

The prequel novel A New Dawn was published in September of 2014, marking the first addition to the new canon, after Disney filed away all the weird shit under the moniker “Legends.”