Kaymyth

1) A ship cannot crash into a planet while at lightspeed. The gravity well pulls the ship out of hyperspace before it can hit. 2) Probably the same deal with the Death Star - it has a big enough gravity well that it's functionally a moon. 3) I would love to see some hypedrive torpedoes next movie.

I doubt that they kept a Dark Side grotto on Coruscant - there's not enough nature left there. They probably sent Padawans who had reached the appropriate age of testing offworld to do it.

I have a couple of lines of thought about this, and while they're not entirely mutually exclusive, it's not inconceivable that one is more correct than the other. This feeds into the first line I have about it. I think in every Jedi's training, they have to be set up to face the temptation of the Dark Side. For Luke it was the tree on Dagobah, and it scared the everliving crem out of him. "Oooo, Luke, face your greatest fear...YOURSELF! Dun, dun dunnn!" So this grotto on Luke's planet has probably been used for this purpose for generations of Jedi. It has a job to do, and dagnabbit, it's been ages since it actually got to do it. So it calls out to Rey, saying, "Hey, kid, come take a look at this cool thing I got for ya..." So of course she went in to check it out. But - and this is important - she did so without fear. Yoda himself has said that fear is the path to the Dark Side (and in general, while Rey often acts with emotion, she doesn't seem to have a lot of fear in her makeup). So Rey went in, said, "Hey, yo, I have questions." The cave said, "Oooo, lookit me, I'm spooky!" Rey was unimpressed and the cave didn't really know what to do with her, so it pulled out the favorite trope of "You fear yourself and your nothingness!" and it just didn't work. Rey came out of the experience unshaken, if a bit perturbed by the whole thing. So that poor cave has to live with the humiliation that the best it could manage to muster was annoying the first Jedi-in-training it had seen in decades, if not centuries. The second tack: The cave was perhaps genuinely sort of trying to help (at least in its own definition of "helping"), and showed Rey the truth - that her parentage isn't what makes her special. Who she is comes from the choices she has made. She's the sort of person who will build up a giant fantasy about a family that loves her and is coming for her rather than face the fact that she was abandoned and hate them for it. By the time she does face that truth, she has already found what she was looking for. She has a family - a family of choice, and a cause she cares about. The realization about her parentage doesn't feed into her anger, but stokes the kinship and love she has found for the people she has found. Finn, who fought for her. Han, who mentored her. Leia, who embraced her immediately upon meeting her out of sheer motherly instinct, that this girl was someone who needed her. Either way, or a combination of the two, the result is the same - Rey isn't even tempted by the Dark Side. She held the power, let it flow through her, and let it go again without harm. Her hesitation at Ben's offer isn't desire to join him, it's sadness that she couldn't save him. As much anger as she had for him at the beginning of the movie, she let it go without hardship, and genuinely mourned the loss of who Ben could have been. Her choices never wavered. Rey is what the Force has been trying to find all along - balance. She can put an end to the endless Jedi-Sith war cycles.

I'm glad you like my rambling. I've got Thoughts about her experience in the cave, too, that I should put together soonish. Puffins are the best. And honestly, the Porgs weren't as bad as the trailers led me to believe they'd be. They were successfully annoying the characters more than the audience, which I think is what made them work. And the little cluster of them staring mournfully at Chewbacca while he cooked and prepared to eat one of them was rusting comedy gold.

You don't have to mark spoilers here; this thread has been purposed specifically for them. Okay! So! Let's do this thing. I don't actually have a problem with Rey being a "nobody" because of other context given in the film. Snoke specifically told Ben that he knew a Jedi would rise to balance him; such is the way of the Force. (Just as Snoke rose to balance Luke; the Force has absolutely had it with people's crem and these kids are going to settle down and behave, so help me, I will TURN THIS GALAXY AROUND AND TAKE US ALL STRAIGHT BACK HOME.) But, to me, that's sufficient explanation for Rey's existence. "Well, we've got this Dark Side kid from the Skywalker line who is conflicted as all get-out. Um. Okay, let's throw some massive Force-sensitiveness onto this girl who is way more emotionally balanced than she has any right to be, given the crem she's been through. Yeah. That'll work. BALANCE." Furthermore, Rey hasn't had all of the Jedi baggage about fearing the Dark Side instilled into her; I've long been convinced that the reasons behind the Dark Side being so seductive has been shaped by people's belief that it is. Then suddenly Rey comes along, a very strong connection to the Force but with none of the preconceptions that come with it, and she can slide into the Dark Side power beneath the island and right back without being corrupted. Luke's shock is more than the obvious, "You didn't even try to resist!" It's that she touched Dark Side power, used it, and then came back without any apparent corruption to her soul. She's just looking at him like, "What? What'd I do? Why are you freaking out, man?" Because she gets it - the Dark Side is necessary. Death and decay feed life in an endless cycle - she gets it on a level that even the Jedi didn't really acknowledge for thousands of years. And it doesn't scare her. She lacks the fear necessary to drive her into corruption, and that's why she's going to come out of this trilogy as a fully balanced Force user - not Dark nor Light, but a balance of the two. And that's how she's going to end the cycle of war. Oh, and a fun fact that I learned today - the Porgs are a direct result of the island they were shooting on being covered in endangered puffins. You couldn't avoid them, you couldn't shoo them away, and trying to digitally remove them was going to be a pain in the rear. It was much easier to CGI something over them. So every Porg you see flailing around in the background is actually a puffin puffining around on the set.

Seriously? You're claiming that there's no proof of Timbre being a Radiant spren in the exact same post you quoted me citing two examples of said proof? I'll recap: 1. A WoB where Brandon clearly states that Venli belongs to a Radiant Order (the same one Eshonai would have been). 2. Venli actually swearing the First Ideal of the Radiants in order to bond Timbre. I really don't know how much clearer it has to be. The flashbacks will be in Eshonai's POV, while Venli picks up as a modern-day major viewpoint character.

It's definitely not Eshonai; it's the Radiant spren that was following Eshonai around. And we have this WoB: Source: https://wob.coppermind.net/events/175-oathbringer-houston-signing/#e8413 Plus there's the fact that Venli's bond with Timbre settled into place when she spoke the First Ideal. It's pretty obvious that Timbre is a Radiant spren.

I understand, but that's still really too soon. The proper action would have been to edit your previous post to add the interjection. Now, if the posts had been weeks apart, it would probably have been fine.

Brandon doesn't always spell things out for us. He knows his readers are smart, and thus lets us intuit some things. The exchanges between Venli and Timbre suggest heavily to me that their bond carries a certain level of empathic communication that we're not seeing explicitly. This sort of thing can be difficult to write. I think Brandon opted for this approach for very practical reasons: to allow the text to flow more freely and cut down a bit on word count.

@Steeldancer you double-posted. Bah! Bah, I say! And humbug! (Seriously, I know it's exciting, but please remember to pay attention to forum rules.)

I mean, snow is an insanely variable thing. Fluctuations that make the difference between a quarter inch to a half inch of rain make huge differences in snowfall amount. On average, a single inch of rain equals 13 inches of snow, though that can vary by humidity. Anybody who has lived somewhere that snows at all knows this. I also live in the lower American Midwest; wild variations in precipitation amount are normal here. We absolutely get storms that will dump a foot of snow on one side of the metro, while the other side only a few miles away gets an inch or two. The idea that your boss doesn't understand this is laughable to me, and just tells me that he is a poor manager. Heck, when we are expecting bad weather, my workplace will offer to put people up in a hotel down the street, just to ensure that we have coverage while keeping our staff as safe as possible. Good employers look out for their people. Bad employers blame their employees for things not within their control.

Don't be silly! You survived the Great Hurricane of 2017. I remember tracking that thing going, "Great good gods, that storm is so lost."

You're always going to have those people - "Well, *I* didn't have any trouble getting in, so I don't see what <person>'s deal was." Take pictures. Take pictures of the snow. Take a picture with a ruler showing the depth. Take pictures of the accidents. Record the news and bring the video in. Drown them in evidence. You were being responsible - responsible for yourself and your own safety.

I have an alto recorder. I manually transpose anything I play on it. I also have a few Irish whistles. Now those things are nuts; they're pitched diatonically instead of chromatically, so which one you play depends entirely on what key the piece is in.

I'm sorry, but I kind of agree with Orlion here. I can't stand any of the classic "crooners". Their voices make me simultaneously want to fall asleep and murder something. The wacky thing about recorders is that while the sizes mean some of them are pitched in different keys from concert, there was never any expectation to write music to accommodate those keys. So if you're playing on a recorder pitched in F (which most of the non-C ones are), you are expected to learn how to transpose it in your head. I could never accomplish that task, so I was always relegated to soprano, tenor, and great bass recorders. I wasn't allowed on sopranino, alto, or bass.

I never really liked that they used the word "choir" for it, but it was a recorder ensemble. This gives you an idea of the crazy size and style range of Renaissance era recorders.

You're running close to a 1:1 post-to-rep-count ratio. That's actually really good.

Hee. It doesn't have to be a lot of times. Just once is fine. Welcome back! And don't drop off the face of the earth again, please.

To quote Molly Weasley: "Beds empty?! No note?!" RUSTIT @Quiver I THOUGHT YOU WERE DEAD IN A DITCH SOMEWHERE I SWEAR... *HUGS* /mom-mode

Dear sweet baby Heru, I'm ordering appliques. And fabric swatches. Blue bordering on turquoise, black lace for trim, with touches of red here and there. And black/gold/silver appliques to go everywhere. This dress is either going to be amazing, or going to be the most amazing failure ever. ...I'm rooting for Option One, tbh.

As the moderator in question here, I feel I ought to add - while the thread was closed down, there were two reports still open that I felt needed addressing (one of them your own). I did not make that clear in my PM, and for that I apologize. But to build on what @Chaos said, if you feel that my PM was in error or problematic, the appropriate response was to either respond and open a dialogue, or escalate it to one of the admins. So far as I am concerned, the door to a discussion there is still open should you wish to walk through it. But I am not going to address the details in public unless you specifically ask me to.

This is heavily dependent on the quality of instrument you have. I have played in a Renaissance recorder choir (many many years ago), and we had top-notch instruments that sounded lovely together.

Muahahaha! My patently ridiculous My Little Pony fic is now officially out to beta readers. I'm one step closer to unleashing it upon an unsuspecting world.

For your Ookla name actually being amusing this year, instead of annoying like last year, despite the fact that the name was exactly the same.