We all know (or, of some cases, even remember) that a shocking amount of people thought the role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons was a direct pipeline to hell in the '80s, but this weird commercial for the table-top RPG probably didn't help.

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On Tuesday Yesterday the Economist published the results of a fun poll asking people which decade they'd most like to return to. Inexplicably, Inexcplicably, the 1990s—objectively speaking the best decade—not only underperformed the overrated 1950s and 1960s but proved to be one of the overall least-popular choices.

People rate it only very slightly higher than the 1940s. Some salient facts about the 1940s: 1940s. There was a big war. One participant in that war had an active policy of targeting enemy civilian population centers for wholesale destruction as a battlefield tactic. Initially they did this with large-scale bombing raids designed to set as many houses ablaze as possible. Eventually they developed nuclear weapons in order to massacre enemy civilians in a more pilot-intensive way. The country in question was allied with a vicious dictator whose political strategies included mass rape, large-scale civilian deportations, and the occasional deliberate engineering of famine conditions. And those were the good guys! We're all very happy they won!

The 1990s, by contrast, were amazing. The Onion memorably commemorated the turn of the millennium millenium with the slogan "our "our long national nightmare of peace and prosperity is over." over". In terms of growth rates, the 1990s 1990sempl were much better than the 1980s or the 2000s and saw the only sustained wage growth we've seen in decades. Compared with to the 1950s or 1960s, 1960s the rates aren't nearly as impressive, but the level of prosperity achieved in 1999 is far above 1959 or 1969 levels. In the 1990s, the worst that would happen to a cash-strapped low-wage worker is they'd have to take on extra shifts to make more money. No yearslong years-long spells of joblessness and despair. It was the best of times, times and it was also the best of times. Political debate was dominated by a dumb sex scandal rather than finger-pointing finger pointing over disastrous wars, financial crises, and mass unemployment. Admittedly, a lot of men were wearing unattractive, ill-fitting suits, unattractive ill-fitting suits but beyond that it was a great time for everyone. Time to get with the program.

Taking the reins of a book series with a devoted following can be daunting for any producer. But for Game of Thrones’ executive producers D.B. Weiss and David Benioff, the solution to adapting George R.R. Martin’s fantasy bestsellers was to be diehard fans of the source material. Weiss and Benioff also enjoy a fruitful open dialogue with author George R.R. Martin, who Weiss says, “ultimately understands that we live and breathe this show. Our devotion to it is total. It’s like a cult.” Their ambition also shows in the scope of the series, which Benioff reveals has a budget of “more than $5 million” an episode, making it among the most expensive epic series produced.

DEADLINE: Last time we spoke was when we first revealed you were doing Game Of Thrones for HBO.

WEISS: Yeah, and you remember that whole Sopranos and Middle Earth thing we first said to you, when you asked for a one-line description of what we wanted to do? Do you remember that line? That line has been haunting us for like 7 years. I always cringe when I hear it.

DEADLINE: Why?

WEISS: It’s insulting to both Sopranos and Lord of the Rings. It’s one thing where you’re trying to sell, and you say, my movie is Die Hard meets Above the Law.

DEADLINE: You are being self-deprecating. You certainly have killed more beloved characters than The Sopranos and other HBO series. You’ve killed a lot of characters I really liked.

BENIOFF: We needed to make room. We only have so many trailers.

DEADLINE: With so many characters to draw, do you have a chart on the wall to keep it all straight?

WEISS: We do have pictures on the wall, in our office in Belfast where we spend half our time. All the head shots are on the wall so yeah; we just throw darts at the ones we don’t want anymore.

BENIOFF: We’re done with all that, knock wood, those major cast reductions. New blood will be introduced, but…

DEADLINE: You’ve been taking a lot of pieces off the chessboard.

WEISS: And we’re still knocking them off. In those first few years, there would just be a black sheet of paper where a head shot was supposed to go, and the name underneath, a chessboard of blank spaces. It was a daunting process, casting all those roles each year, and so satisfying to see those squares eventually get in with the faces you’d chosen.

DEADLINE: Neither of you comes from a traditional TV background, but both of you are authors who’ve written film scripts. How much does that account for why this feels different from most TV shows?

WEISS: We were too ignorant to know what we were getting ourselves into, so we just jumped right into it and only found out what we were shouldering after it was way too late to turn back.

BENIOFF: Ignorance, going back to the very first meeting we had with George Martin, when we took him to lunch and he said upfront, “You know I wrote these books to be un-producible.” Now, George worked in television for a number of years and got sick of its limitations, sick that every time he wrote a script the producers would say “George we love it, but we don’t have time to shoot it all.” And so he said “fuck it, I’ll write books that are way too big for anyone to make because it would cost too much.” And then we had this lunch with him and when he said “You know this is impossible to produce,” like idiots we said, “No, no, we got this one.” We didn’t known enough about television to know A) to be afraid and B) that the stuff we wanted to do wasn’t really feasible.

DEADLINE: What was the first rude awakening in transferring one of your big ideas to the screen?

WEISS: In the first season, when we were shooting constantly, sometimes with four first units going at the same time, being naïve as to how television works, we took a movie-driven notion and thought we would write the scripts and be on set every day. When you have four sets going in three different countries, that’s not physically possible. We realized slowly what it meant to be working in a television world, where the time pressures are so intense and yet you’re still trying to deliver a viewing experience that at least visually is more informed by feature film than television.

BENIOFF: Our inexperience showed when, in the first season our shows came in really short. For HBO it’s supposed to be around 52 or 54 minutes, and we had a bunch of episodes clocking in at 40 minutes. It was a crisis because we had very little money left and had to somehow come up with an extra 90 minutes.

WEISS: We had to create 100 pages in two weeks.

BENIOFF: Because we had no money left, these had to be inexpensive scenes, like two actors in a room. We certainly could not add any battle stuff. So we ended up writing like 15 scenes or something over the course of the first season.

DEADLINE: And it wouldn’t be prudent to have filler scenes where they talk sports or the weather.

BENIOFF: We wish it had been that easy. But these scenes ended up being some of our favorites of the season. Like one scene between King Robert [Mark Addy] and Cersei Lannister [Lena Headey] in the first season, when before that they didn’t have any scenes along together. There had to be moments where, even if they hated each other, they are still married and would be forced to be alone together in a room. The show would have been a lot weaker without that and other ‘Hail Mary’ scenes we threw at the time because we were out of money.

WEISS: It was good we were forced into a place where we had to literally go off book and start making the show live and breathe on its own as a show inspired by the books but not fully informed by them. We were talking recently with Homeland’s Alex Gansa about his experience, who said after seeing the original Israeli form of Homeland and saying “oh great, I can just change the names and I got myself a television show.” And obviously, when he got into the meat of adapting it he realized it was far from that simple. We love George’s books and we went into it thinking these were great. But you realize no matter how great, books are not shows or movies; each operates on their own different rules. Game of Thrones is no different. Being forced to come up with those scenes on short notice helped how we were viewing the show and forcing it to come into its own.

DEADLINE: Describe your relationship with George R.R. Martin and how you factor in his creative wishes and your own instincts for storytelling.

BENIOFF: First of all, I’d say it’s a really good relationship, and the whole reason we wanted to do the series was because we love the books. George is not a naïve dude, he’s spent his time in the Hollywood trenches and he’s had enough people talking bullshit to him. He had offers way before we came around because after Lord of the Rings, people were looking for the next fantasy franchise. He kept saying no because everyone he talked to, he felt they read only the coverage. And those who said they’d cracked it into a two hour movie would tell Jon Snow’s story or it would be Daenerys’ story and you lose all those other interesting characters. We said, “We want to tell the whole story—as much of it as we possibly can in ten hours a season.” But that also means there are going to be changes, and we’ve definitely had disagreements; every season we have disagreements about certain things.

DEADLINE: Any come to mind specifically?

WEISS: Lots of it. The stuff we’ve talked about most recently applies to the fourth season and beyond, so I wouldn’t want to get into that. But in the abstract, it usually comes down to us feeling like we have to limit the number of new faces we see on the screen and him talking about the “Butterfly Effect” that runs through the whole story. We understand that but for the good of the show we need to work around that and not give more information than people can handle.

BENIOFF: George understands that we don’t make these kinds of decisions flippantly or lightly, and we always want to give him a chance to kick back at us. Sometimes we’ll say, “You’re right,” and it’s ultimately worth rerouting something we were planning on doing.

WEISS: It drives him nuts that characters are fighting without wearing their helmets.

BENIOFF: That’s one of the places where we talk about the difference between the source material and the medium you’re transporting it to. It doesn’t matter whether a character has a helmet on in the book because we can access what’s inside the helmet, but in TV, we can’t do that unless we can see the guy’s face. It’s a mundane-sounding thing, but it impacts the kinds of things you can do and can’t do onscreen.

DEADLINE: What arcs in the last season made you most proud?

BENIOFF: I’d say the Theon Greyjoy for both of us has been really something…

DEADLINE: He’s the reluctant conqueror who sacked Winterfell to please his father, was betrayed by his men, taken prisoner and spent the last season being tortured mercilessly.

WEISS: So much of it is due to Alfie Allen’s vulnerable performance. He’s a character who’s doing horrible things in a world where people are doing horrible things, and he’s just digging himself in deeper. And you’re with him every step of the way and you understand why he’s doing what he’s doing but you’re also saying “please don’t do what I know you’re about to do.” Because you know it’s going to make things worse, not better.

DEADLINE: Because he knew it was wrong.

WEISS: Joffrey, for example, is a character who’s doing hateful and horrible things and he’s a psychopath; I can’t look at Joffrey and say I understand at a gut level why you are doing the things you are doing as a human being. Because I don’t think I’m a psychopath. Yet, but ask me again in Season Six. But Theon was doing terrible things, and yet it’s so easy to understand what was driving him to do those things. On all sorts of different levels I thought that was a very satisfying thing.

BENIOFF: So much of it comes down to the actor. You want to find someone who can not only fit the role, but do something with it that no one else can. And that was true with Lena Headey. When we saw her for Cersei we saw dozens of actresses. All of them were playing the typical “ice queen.” And Lena came in and she was funny, in a nasty way. She made us laugh, and no one else had. She broadened our view of what that character could be. So when she wants to be charming she can be, and even people who should know better get drawn in. Once you find those actors, it becomes a great privilege to help their characters grow.

DEADLINE: George Martin has dictated in his books who gets killed, and you guys bump off way more actors than happens on regular TV. I can remember the days of Hill Street Blues, when they killed the cop character played by Ed Marinaro. Shocking. Besides the beheading of Sean Bean’s Ned Stark character that set the tone for all this in Season One, what has been the toughest death scene that you had to script for the characters that you most hated to let go of as writers?

WEISS: Man, Hill Street Blues was on when I was 12 and I remember feeling I’d never seen anything like it, it was that far ahead of its time, with dark characters you loved. I remember Ed Marinaro, the football star.

BENIOFF: I remember when that M.A.S.H. episode, when Radar O’Reilly said that Colonel Blake had been killed in a helicopter crash. That had a serious emotional impact on me as a kid.

WEISS: Hey, what about the brother in Happy Days who walked upstairs and never came back down?

BENIOFF: I mentioned the pieces on the board, and it’s a real good way of looking at it. At the beginning there was an expansion to populate the game board and we are at the point where it heads in the other direction and these pieces play off each other and, occasionally, kill each other off, knocking them off the game board. This necessary contraction will continue until the end if we’re lucky enough to get that far. There is a real fundamental satisfaction seeing things head in that direction.

WEISS: Well it’s harder for us than George and that’s because George is killing off one figment of his imagination, and we’re forced to say goodbye. Jason Momoa became a really good friend of ours when he played Khal Drogo. We loved hanging out with Momoa and suddenly we couldn’t bring him to Belfast anymore.

DEADLINE: Anyone try to lobby you out of killing their character?

WEISS: There are definitely some deaths coming up where the actors are like “are you sure you gotta..?” There are also some characters we have to kill who don’t die in the books, or who are going to die earlier in the series than the books. So we don’t want people to be too confident that they know exactly what’s going to happen, and it is hard. You work a long time on this show and you become close to people, and the idea of killing them doesn’t just mean this character isn’t going to be in the series anymore, it means basically we’re not going to see this person.

BENIOFF: We have a death coming up, and a lovely young woman who doesn’t want to die.

DEADLINE: What’s the great challenge of plotting out each season where so much has to happen to keep pace with the books and the inevitable clash with the White Walkers?

BENIOFF: We knew where to start and where we would end, so if was figuring out the middle and making sure the characters were going to end up in the right places. We went in with a pretty good idea of where the characters were heading and some we knew nothing until we went into a room and started talking about but then once we get to the end point we get a good sense about how to drive everything there. The person taking you on the journey needs to be confident. We are both obsessed with Breaking Bad, and the great thing about Vince Gilligan is you he’s taking that character some place and that he has a beginning, middle and end in mind. And for us what is most enticing about this series, is, if we’re lucky enough to get to the end, there will be 80 hours of screen time with a beginning, middle, and a real end. Not something that feels like 80 separate episodes, but instead something where, if you were masochistic enough, you could go into a theater and watch a marathon of the whole thing.

WEISS: I’d like to add that to endure such a marathon would probably have to involve a Clockwork Orange scenario, with your eyes forced open.

DEADLINE: Sounds like you’re in this until you finish?

WEISS: I hope so. We went into this with the ambition to tell this story through to the end. We’ve been given this great gift, this huge canvas of these beautiful books by George Martin, and the idea of telling this whole epic through to the end is incredibly compelling. We’d love to be there to shoot the last scene.

Robbo sez, "Charles Dellschau, a retired butcher in Texas in the late 1800's created a series of scrapbooks: '2,500 intricate drawings of flying machines alongside cryptic newspaper clippings filled the pages, crudely sewn together with shoelaces and thread' - it's an astonishing collection of mystery and whimsey with loads of drawings and plans for arcane flying machines, a secret society and coded messages strewn throughout. The books were found by a junk dealer in the 1960's and are now valued at $15,000 - per page."

These are astounding illustrations and amazing fantasies; they've been collected in a book called THE SECRETS OF DELLSCHAU: The Sonora Aero Club and the Airships of the 1800s, A True Story, which includes a lot of commentary on Dellschau's work and context.

He began with three books entitled Recollections which purported to describe a secret organization called the Sonora Aero Club. Dellschau described his duties in the club as that of the draftsman. Within his collaged watercolors were newspaper clippings (he called them “press blooms”) of early attempts at flight overlapped with his own fantastic drawings of airships of all kind. Powered by a secret formula he cryptically referred to as “NB Gas” or “Suppa” — the “aeros” (as Dellscahu called them) were steampunk like contraptions with multiple propellers, wheels, viewing decks and secret compartments. Though highly personal, autobiographical (perhaps!), and idiosyncratic, these artworks could cross-pollinate with the fiction of Jules Verne, Willy Wonka and the Wizard of Oz. The works were completed in a furiously creative period from 1899 to 1923, when air travel was still looked at by most people as almost magical. Newspapers of that period were full of stories about air travel feats and the acrobatic aerial dogfights of WWI were legend.

Dreams of the Sonora Aero Club [John Foster/Design Observer]

(Thanks, Robbo!)

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Sidney Myers, a 20-year-old South Carolina man, had procured a powerful handheld device built in a foreign country, a device which allowed him both to transmit a bomb threat and to create child pornography. The device was an HTC smartphone, and his use of the phone has now branded Myers a lifelong sex offender and landed him an 18 month federal prison sentence. His public defender claims that the “facts of this case have never been seen in our jurisdiction and likely will not be seen again,” but in the smartphone age, perhaps the facts no longer seem as unusual as they once would have.

Problems began when Myers met a young woman in a club. According to Myers’ lawyer, the woman told him that she was 18—though in reality she was just 16. They began dating, which led to sex, which led to videos of sex, all taken on Myers’ smartphone with the woman’s full consent. (Two different government press releases on Myers say he had either five or six such videos on his phone; the exact number is unclear.)

That age difference didn’t matter, legally, when it came to having sex. “It should be noted that under both South Carolina and federal law, the age of consent is 16, so it was legal for them to have sex whether she was 16 or 18,” wrote Myers’ lawyer in a court filing. But the age difference did matter when it came to recording the act. Because the girl was a minor, the images were child pornography under federal law, even though they involved a consensual relationship and someone above the age of consent.

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In 2008, the Supreme Court decided Crawford vs. Marion County Election Board. Previously, the state of Indiana had passed a statute requiring voters to show photo ID at polling places, something that was likely to disproportionately hurt black turnout. Indiana's justification for the law was its interest in preventing voter fraud, something that they were unable to demonstrate even a single case of. Nonetheless, the court upheld the law under this reasoning:

If a nondiscriminatory law is supported by valid neutral justifications, those justifications should not be disregarded simply because partisan interests may have provided one motivation for the votes of individual legislators. The state interests identified as justifications for SEA 483 are both neutral and sufficiently strong to require us to reject petitioners’ facial attack on the statute. The application of the statute to the vast majority of Indiana voters is amply justified by the valid interest in protecting “the integrity and reliability of the electoral process.”

Today, the Supreme Court decided Shelby County vs. Holder, an attack on the "preclearance" requirement of the Voting Rights Act. In 2006, Congress renewed the Act for 25 years, and after considering voluminous evidence decided not to make changes to the formula for deciding which states require preclearance for changes to their voting regulations and which ones don't. Nonetheless, the court overturned the law:

Congress did not use the record it compiled to shape a coverage formula grounded in current conditions. It instead reenacted a formula based on 40-year-old facts having no logical relation to the present day. The dissent relies on “second-generation barriers,” which are not impediments to the casting of ballots, but rather electoral arrangements that affect the weight of minority votes. That does not cure the problem. Viewing the preclearance requirements as targeting such efforts simply highlights the irrationality of continued reliance on the §4 coverage formula, which is based on voting tests and access to the ballot, not vote dilution. We cannot pretend that we are reviewing an updated statute, or try our hand at updating the statute ourselves, based on the new record compiled by Congress.

Note the difference. In Crawford, where the target is a law that's likely to disenfranchise black voters, the bar for constitutionality is almost absurdly low. Regardless of what the real motives of the lawmakers are, or what the likely effect of the law is, it's valid if the state merely asserts a "neutral justification." That's it.

But in Shelby County, where the target is a law designed to protect black voters, the bar for constitutionality is suddenly much higher. Even though the Fifteenth Amendment gives Congress the unconditional right to enact legislation designed to prevent states from abridging the right to vote "on account of race [or] color," the court ruled that, in fact, Congress is quite fettered after all. It cannot decide to simply renew a law that it thinks is working well. Instead, it's required by the court to update its formulas to satisfy the court's notions of what's logical and what isn't.

So here's your nickel summary. If a law is passed on a party-line vote, has no justification in the historical record, and is highly likely to harm black voting, that's OK as long as the legislature in question can whomp up some kind of neutral-sounding justification. Judicial restraint is the order of the day. But if a law is passed by unanimous vote, is based on a power given to Congress with no strings attached, and is likely to protect black voting, that's prohibited unless the Supreme Court can be persuaded that Congress's approach is one they approve of. Judicial restraint is out the window. Welcome to the 21st century.