TWG 33%: Brandon 100% (113/113), Peter 0% (0/113), Isaac 0% (0/75), Ben 0% (0/38)
17s 0%: Brandon 0% (0/91), Peter 0% (0/97), Isaac 0% (0/97), Ben 0% (0/86)
Reddit 40%: Brandon 99% (119/120), Peter 0% (0/93), Isaac 0% (0/11), Ben 0% (0/74), Adam 0% (0/2)
Twitter 29%: Brandon 99% (112/113), Peter 0% (0/113), Isaac % (0/120), Adam 0%(0/45)
Blog 99%: Brandon 99% (170/171)
Social Media Total: 33% (514/1572)
Theoryland Total Review: 0% (5/1183)
Events and Signings review: TBD

What is this? A progress update? Hasn't Arcanum been out for almost a year now. What is going on here?

So, Arcanum is great, to the surprise of no one. It's got everything Brandon has ever said in it; all that's left to do should be to keep up with new stuff in a timely manner. But me, being the overachieving individual that I am (and freed from the shackles of modhood to pursue my own endeavors), I want to take personal accountability that Arcanum is absolutely comprehensive. I don't want to just say "the Internet has made sure everything of Brandon is in here." I want to say, "I swear to you on a stack of Stormlight books that nothing is missing."

I can already say that with almost complete confidence about Brandon's online presence. (I haven't gone through all his forum posts here on the Shard, but I don't expect any of those could possibly be missed. But I am gonna check anyways, of course.) I have a lot of confidence that items from Theoryland or the Events and Signings forum has made it over. There have been a couple of confirmed instances of these things being missed, so I'm gonna go over everything and put my personal stamp of approval on it. (And I also, you know, like WoT, and I'm taking the opportunity to read through the entire Interview Database. I'm learning stuff already; did you know the Horn of Valere was from the Age before the Age of Legends?)

But I also want to get back to my social media dredging, to look through other Dragonsteel team members. (The way I'm gauging progress, up above, is by months of activity reviewed. The percentages will move in fits and starts - some people aren't as busy as others, and activity habits ebb and rise. But assuming it will all smooth out, this should provide a pretty reasonable metric.) There are occasional goodies from these individuals that I'd like to get recorded in Arcanum, so I will go ahead and do the dirty work of digging back through the archives. I don't expect there to be much, but I do expect there to be something. I'm not sure how many of you are familiar with the 80/20 rule. It's an idea in projects, that the first 80% of the project will only require 20% of your total effort. The last 20%, though, that requires the other 80% of your effort. And that's where we are with Arcanum (maybe more like 90% or 95%) - there aren't any big things missing, and the only missing stuff is either very recent, barely notable (like some of the general Q&A or writing advice from recent cons), or extremely obscure. I'm gonna get us up to snuff on the obscure stuff.

I do need some help on a couple of things. Ben McSweeney, one of Brandon's artists, is someone on my list. But I couldn't find a Twitter account for him. He often goes by Inkthinker, but he doens't have that handle on Twitter. Does anybody know if he's on Twitter, and what his handle is? Also, I'd like to check Facebook comments, and since Facebook is in the business of collecting selling your personal information (heyo!), I figured there'd be some kind of way to see all someone's public FB comments. But I haven't had any luck so far. If you know of a way to do a good Facebook dredge, please hit me up, and I'll add that to my worklist, as well.

So I'm gonna go back to my progress updates, since I liked how they kept me on track before. I'll share anything interesting I find (although you'll also be able to keep up with those through the Recent Entries tab on Arcanum itself), I'll let you all know how things are going. My tentative goal would be to get this all done before Stormlight Four is out, but we'll see how quick it goes. (I've got more projects to think about once all these review are done; a full review of all Arcanum's audio, a couple Collections to help with beginners, getting my old tag database up and running. Those kind of things. But for now, I'm gonna work on the import.)