Kaymyth

Clearly, your RAFOs need more rum.

Look out, kids! Chaos is getting drunk on power.

Ow. My poor thoughtmeats.

Heh, yep. My husband and I just moved across the state line in May, so we haven't had much chance to investigate the oddities of the place. We're pretty far in the northeast of town, almost into Overland Park.

And then, of course, after the Mistborn trilogy you must move on to the Mistborn Era 2 books - Alloy of Law and Shadows of Self. Bands of Mourning is then due to be released next month. That should give you some stuff to chomp on! Speaking of chomping, beware Sharders gifting cookies.

We did, indeed, get all of my generation of first cousins in the same place at the same time yesterday. We hadn't done that in umpty-mumble years, so we got pictures. The funeral went about as well as funerals go. I did pretty well for the most part, but Granddaddy was buried with full military honors and so I found myself tearing up when the flag was presented. He was a World War II veteran, a Navy fighter pilot in the Pacific. We don't have many of those left, and I know that a lot of folks around here are young enough to not have many strong memories of family members from that era. So I'm going to tell you all a story about my grandfather. It's one that Granddaddy told everyone, one that we all grew up knowing. Documentaries have been made about what happened in that story, but he was there in the thick of it all. The USS Franklin was an aircraft carrier, nicknamed "Big Ben". It was the carrier on which Granddaddy served through most of his involvement in the war. He flew quite a few different types of aircraft, but the only two I know specifically were the Corsair https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vought_F4U_Corsair and the Hellcat https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grumman_F6F_Hellcat. He flew fighter sorties and reconnaissance photography missions. On March 19, 1945, the Franklin took a massive bomb hit. It was early in the morning, and Granddaddy had been on the last flight of the previous night, so he was asleep when it happened; he slept right through the first part of it, only waking up when the "man all battlestations" alarm went out. When he made it up on deck, the ship was in chaos. Fires burned on the flight deck, and smoke and carnage were everywhere. He ducked back down below decks just long enough to get a life vest and then ran back up to start helping. A lot of what he did was firefighting; there was a lot of airplane fuel and ordinance on that ship, so more things kept catching fire and exploding. At one point, he was one of a group of men rounded up by the ship's chaplain, Father O'Callahan, to organize assistance. There's a documentary of the Franklin that features brief footage of my grandfather assisting O'Callahan with giving a few sailors last rites. Eventually, the carrier Santa Fe pulled up alongside the Franklin to assist with rescue efforts, and her captain took one look at the pilots involved in dangerous firefighting work and just about blew his top. He ordered Granddaddy and the other pilots off of the ship, telling them that they were not expendable. (Other accounts attribute the order to the captain of the Franklin; it's quite probable they both gave the order near the same time.) They dropped a radio mast down between the two ships and used it to crawl over to the Santa Fe. When all was said and done, Franklin had lost over 800 of her crew, with an additional 300 wounded, the heaviest losses a carrier had ever taken and remained afloat. And even with a severe list and heavy damage, she did indeed stay afloat; the captain refused to leave the ship, insisting on overseeing enough repairs to get her back to port under her own power. It was 12,000 miles and over a month's journey, but they made it back to Pearl Harbor. And that's how the Franklin became known as The Ship That Wouldn't Die.

I miss Arizona winters.

Actually, there's a lot more to her name than that. The story's on the boards somewhere.

Olathe, Kansas

Yeah, my recipe for this for my sci-fi series is mostly, "Take some bit of realish physics, add a dash of alien handwavium, bake at 350,000 degrees for however long it takes to write the book, and serve."

But also: the Elements of Harmony! This just in: Equestria is a far, far-future Scadrial.

Check out the cooling fan; it may need cleaning and/or replacing.

My desktop is the cover art from Alloy of Law. My laptop is a Doctor Who thingie featuring Gallifreyan script.

Really, I think we can just shorten this to, "Loved Wayne." I don't know, I think this is showing us a hint of character growth (finally!) I think it makes sense in context; there was definitely a hint of MeLaan finding him interesting in SoS. It might be that this rang a few bells in the back of Wayne's head to make him actually start thinking in terms of, "Oh, hey, there actually might be some chicks out there who would actually dig me?" It's easy to stay hung up on someone forever if you don't believe you have any other prospects.

I know it's supposed to be Santa Man-Thing, but I keep looking at it and seeing Santa Cthulhu. 9 out of 10 Elder Gods approve.

Start writing down all of the questions you get asked. Take notes and write down awesome answers. That way you'll be even better prepared for the next interview. (And hey, phone interviews mean you can shamelessly refer to your notes, right?)

This is all true, but in the context of the particular complaints, it was, "If I stay up until I'm tired, then I can fall asleep easily, but by then it's stupid late."

Yes. A lot of people don't understand/believe it, though, so they'll scoff at those "lazy" teens still in bed at noon without understanding that said teen was literally unable to fall asleep before 3AM the previous night, despite all attempts to do so.

Not all Allomancers use alcohol for their metals. Besides that, the vials are so small that there's not enough in there to actually get someone drunk. It's really a negligible amount. My question: What is Terris food like? There must be some level of deliciousness involved that being able to send out for it at any time of night in Elendel is a noteworthy perk!

Welcome to the madhouse! I'm glad I'm not the only person who managed to get bitten by the writing bug thanks to the Cosmere. I went from "that sounds like too much work" to a new character in my brain inciting me to say, "ohmygods, if I write you already will you please shut up?"

Actually, I do want to see him in the book, but feel that it's such a given that he will be that I'm putting my vote in on someone who's not a shoo-in. Because apparently my brain thinks that this vote actually makes a difference there. Yeah. Tonight's logic brought to you by Wayne's Pickles.

Kelsier should probably win. But he'd be close to finishing it up, and then he'd catch the look on Vin's face and realize that it'd be a lot less hazardous to his health if he just threw the fight and let Elend win.

It gets better down the road. Being a teenager, though, is the worst. Oh, and on the subject of insomnia, you guys do know that in the late teens through early twenties, your circadian rhythms go all out of whack and shift your natural sleep cycles later, right? This is a documented phenomenon. It's not your fault, but it's annoying as all heck and the rest of the world doesn't like to adjust to accommodate you. It'll shift back eventually, right about the time you get out of college.

It is! The sort of thing that I can let slip out in mixed company without parents getting mad at me for damaging their poor children's innocence.

Hoo boy. I have no advice for dating at the high school level. I really didn't get into that until college. One of the curses of going to a small town high school was that there were no boys my age into nerdy things, so I had no pool of potential dates to draw from. Mostly, I was mocked a lot and suffered.