The Internet is full of interesting things to read outside of The A.V. Club—no, really! In our periodic Read This posts, we point you toward interesting or noteworthy pieces that caught our eye.
Pieces about how realistic fiction is are always interesting, and there are two today that caught The A.V. Club’s eye. First up is Wired’s investigation of Game Of Thrones’ ice climbing technique. While Game Of Thrones isn’t based entirely in fact (dragons!), this Sunday’s wall scaling scene left mountaineering expert and GOT fan Katie Mills out in the cold. While the Wildings used a running belay, for instance, real ice climbers would never attach themselves to each other, lest one climber’s fall cause everyone to tumble. And while Orell had some trouble cutting Jon Snow and Ygritte free, in real life the rope would be so taut that it would instantly sever if a knife even grazed it. Mills makes a couple other good points in the piece, though she fails to question why the Wildings never wear winter hats.
If worrying about medieval-tinged fantasy scenarios isn’t for you, check out Vulture’s look at Jay Gatsby’s theoretically strained finances. The New York Magazine site pulled some estimated income and expenditure figures on the bootlegger and—shocker—determined that in the book, he’s living far beyond his means. Granted, this was also how The Great Gatsby author F. Scott Fitzgerald lived so it’s certainly possible that were Gatsby real, that he could have just been living large, but that doesn’t mean that he could have maintained that lifestyle for long.