Kaymyth

I firmly believe that double accidentals were created by evil music gnomes to torment young and old musicians alike. The next time you see one in rehearsal, raise your fist to the sky and cry out, "Accursed dark gnomes!" and watch the entire room stare at you like you're a lunatic. Ordinary sharps and flats, well, those are useful. It would be boring if everything were in the key of C major or A minor all the time. You don't have to have perfect pitch to start recognizing when pieces are in the same key. That's why certain bands (*coughcoughnickelbackcough*) have so many songs that sound alike. Either their guitarists can't handle exotic keys (and by exotic I mean "anything with flats"), or their lead vocalist has a limited range that doesn't let them spread out too far. They wind up with the same keys and sticking with familiar chord progressions, which has the unfortunate effect of making it all sound the same. College-level music theory gets a whole lot more complicated and useful than most of the stuff you've probably been exposed to thus far. The whole point is to teach you how it all fits together to build the basis for writing/transcribing good music. Things like writing good voice parts (parallel fifths are verboten, except when they're not), putting together standard chord progressions, handling key changes and the like. And then there's the aural skills to go along with it; you learn to recognize and name intervals just by hearing them, finding the tonic in a chord, etc. It all culminates in orchestration where you learn to put it all together and figure out how to arrange music for different sets of instruments without creating Truly Impossible Things. Honestly, it's all really cool when it comes together. Except for atonal stuff; that can all go die in a fire.

That fills my little nerdy heart with joy. Except that there will be 4 AoL-era books, so perhaps that makes it 3.6? 3.7599999? Or do we just call it an "almost-complete Hitchhiker's Guide" trilogy?

Heh. I was thinking more along the lines of

Chiming in on the Dresden Files Are Awesome side. You can definitely see how his writing style tightens up quite a bit after the first three; it's also worth noting that he wrote the first few before any of them were published. Like Brandon, he's done a lot of plotting and worldbuilding in the series. There's a lot of stuff going on behind the scenes that Harry only gets glimpses of in the first many books. It's not until the last 2 or 3 most recent books that the "camera" has started panning out and you actually start to see what's really been going on.

You already know some of these. I'm the one who's been responding to you on the rant thread. But I play oboe, flute (both standard and 6-hole), saxophone, recorder, Irish whistle, and piano. I could probably tackle clarinet if I bothered to learn the squirrelly fingering scheme. I've taken at least basic tech courses on all of the instrument families due to spending a few years as a music major before shifting over to education. (Yes, I have an elementary ed degree. I work at a bank. I'm making as much I as I would be teaching with a job at about half the difficulty level.)

True, but still. He's part of the pun, he should be more. There's always the last book... Wayne could be on ALL the covers...

I'm a musician. Music is arts. I also sew, primarily costuming. My next project (to get really going on as soon as we're done moving) is that armored Jean Grey bit that I've been planning for a while now. After that, I've got some Alloy of Law designs in mind.

Or it could be the as-unnamed kandra in human guise. And STILL no Wayne on the cover? I feel cheated.

I would hope so. She might've wanted a solid player on the 2nd parts just so that the notes would all get hit. Still, a good director would *tell* you that; in a proper band/orchestra, the first chair player is 1st part, while the second chair is 2nd part. That distributes the parts amongst the strongest players. I can't offer much advice to fix it, but at least I can validate your feelings on the matter. It's not you, it's her. Jerkweasels. I'd point out politely that I could play louder and blow out their eardrums if they like. Also, spend warm-up time practicing the piccolo solo from Stars and Stripes Forever. Doesn't matter if you're not actually working on it in rehearsal, finding a copy isn't hard. It's the single most legendarily awesome piccolo part known to man and is really, really shrill. You'll sound cool, and they'll suffer.

This cord-cutter is jealous. I've gotta wait for it all to hit Netflix.

The heck? Piccolo is *harder* than flute! I call shenanigans on your director, because that's just stupid. (Lifelong musician here. Oboe is my primary instrument, but I play the flute family as well.)

Well, LotR is the source of many of the tropes that we now see in fantasy literature. You might consider counterpointing that with how Brandon subverted some of those key tropes. (I.E., the Chosen Hero isn't who we think it is, the Evil Overlord was actually trying to save the world, etc.)

...there is so much potential for thread derailing in the context of polytheistic paganism and offerings here.

Heck, the further north you go, the more I'd suspect that civilization is limping along. There's a huge advantage to be had in winters cold enough to freeze walkers solid.

They had some armor early in the show, but it got lost in various attacks. They probably could make some padded stuff that would be harder to bite through, but right now, it's the South in the middle of summer. Try wearing inch-thick padding all over your body in the American Southeast in summer, and you'll die of heatstroke and/or dehydration long before the walkers come to get you.

Except it's Handerwym who's actually writing it all down (I think Jak is dictating it to him**). If you haven't read the MAG supplement's Pits of Eltania "episodes", do so. Handerwym's sarcastic footnotes are utterly hysterical. I was laughing so hard when I read it that my husband kept giving me strange looks. **Or Jak is writing it down and Handerwym is editing for publication. Either way, I remember a pretty disctinct complaint on the Terrisman's part about how Jak insists that "koloss" is spelled with an exclamation point in the middle.

The issue that your mother is missing here is that really, it's just not appropriate to lecture an adult, even if said adult is your child. I mean, parental types can try it, but it's just not going to end well (case in point). Down that road lies anger and resentment and unnecessary arguments. It's as much circumstance as personality clashes; you're still living with them (or doing so again). There are certain patterns and habits that have been ingrained into both you and your parents that come with the living together dynamic. You have a particular spot in the family hierarchy that you have occupied for your entire life, and trying to break out of that is really, really difficult. It often take the child living on their own for a while for the parents to accept them as adult peers rather than children who need parenting. You also need the opportunity to establish your own patterns in your own space, which will give you better footing for dealing with them in the future. What's funny is that from their point of view, someday they're going to look at you and *poof!* "When did Twi suddenly become a grownup?" when, in fact, you have been doing just fine acting like one for years at that juncture.

Do we have to know who we're looking for specifically? Because I'd like to track down the designer of the Antikythera Mechanism and get the blueprints.

45 minutes outside today, the day after the first day of spring. A mere 45 minutes, and I am sunburned. ...the Curse of the Ginger...

True, though the older TLR got, the more atium he had to burn to stay the same age. He went through at least a handful of them, I'd say. It'd take a lot more than a handful to melt down and turn into bracers, though. A LOT of geodes' worth of beads went into those things.

We should also take into account the atium that TLR actually had to use himself; those atium bracers had to come from somewhere, and he was compounding atium to stay alive. That would've consumed a pretty large portion of what came out of the Pits.

I'm afraid that I don't have a digital copy, and I'm at work and can't go look up my physical one at the moment, but there's definitely some details in there about how some normal humans have joined the koloss ranks. (This is how we wound up with koloss-blooded Allomancers.) If you prove yourself tough enough in a fight, you earn a set of spikes. There are always more koloss-blooded kids than spikes, though, so A) at least half of them wind up leaving the tribe and skirting the edges of human society, and relatively few normal humans have the gumption necessary to go out and win against the competing koloss-blooded.

Yes; Sazed was able to change the hemalurgical function to be less damaging to the psyche. A lot of this is actually referenced in the AoL MAG supplement, and the canonicity of what happened with the koloss is supported by the Pits of Eltania story that Brandon wrote.

Depends on whether you're a pre- or post-Harmony Koloss.

I survived staffing Naka Kon. Go security ninjas! But...seriously, people. Making up your own parking spaces is not an acceptable thing. It is not even close to being acceptable. The main lot is out of spaces? Too bad! Go park in overflow parking! It's right over there! Two blocks is NOT that far to walk; trust me, I did it on Saturday. If an asthmatic 37-year-old can do it cheerfully without any trouble, the rest of you young whippersnappers can somehow manage it. And to the person whose moronic made-up parking space made it difficult for me to get out on Friday (and probably impossible for the person parked next to me), I hope you step on a Lego. That is all. *flump*