Dunkum

kind of, but I wouldn't put it that way, personally. I got more "unreliable narrator - cyberpunk edition" vibes than "secret agent with amnesia". Like I said, my read of the book wasn't going in a Jason Bourne direction. I don't really recall exactly what I was thinking at the time, but it was definitely closer to what we actually got. I can sort of see how you'd arrive there but it definitely wasn't how I saw it.

Sure, if you phrase it like that. but if you phrase things vaguely enough, you can make Mistborn sound like Little Orphan Annie. the question is, where did that come from? its not directly from the book that I can see. Is it from any pre-release material or interviews or some such? and to be clear that's an honest question - I went into all 4 secret project books blind. the only thing I knew going in is that 1 of them was non-cosmere - so if that quote is from Brandon, or someone affiliated with him, I agree it would be at least a little misleading

Is that the promise we got? I certainly never had that impression, but I also never read any promo material or the like. from just the book itself I never thought we were getting Jason Bourne.

Been playing Fire Emblem Engage the last couple days (was originally going to get 3 Houses but it was out of stock and I didn't feel like waiting). been enjoying it so far, though I probably have the difficulty set too low; but I felt like doing a low stress run first. my prior experience with Fire Emblem is that I hate losing characters and tend to replay a level over and over again until i get bored with the whole thing, so dropping the difficulty helps prevent that, though I may have overdone it slightly - my main character is practically untouchable, and often takes no damage even when hit.

huh, ok. didn't double check the timing on that one, but the basic point still stands. Perrin is one of the consistently better viewpoint characters, to me at least, and the hunt for Faile drags him down substantially, especially at the beginning. it does get better, as he focuses more on solutions vs problems, but for a while there his chapters are darker an less fun to read.

I think my issue with it is that it was 4 books where Perrin was more broody and generally less fun to read. Rand is pretty bad for most of that stretch too (he has his good points in there, but everything leading up to Dumai's Wells really did a number on his sanity and thus my ability to enjoy his chapters) and Nynaeve and Elayne are hit or miss in the best of times, so Perrin, Mat, and Egwene are doing most of the heavy lifting. Piling on Perrin threatens that balance even more. I think that gets at why Path of Daggers is one of my least favorite books: with Mat absent and Perrin consumed by the search for Faile, we are basically left with Egwene, and she just isn't enough to carry the whole book by herself like that

he remains one of y favorites but some of his middle chapters definitely get rough to read.

think I've red it twice and honestly, this is about my take on it too.

Returned are just put back into their original bodies, I think. or at least the one case where we get a description of the process happening that was the case; suppose it could be different if the original body was completely destroyed. Heralds are a better example, but they are roped up in the oathpact, which involves 2 shards and more than enough investiture to build them new bodies every time they reincarnate.

steadily working my way through my Discworld reread. finished Going Postal last night, and realized I had skipped a couple books because they are listed separately as being "young adult". specifically The Amazing Maurice and his Educated Rodents plus the first 2 Tiffany Aching books. pretty sure I missed The Amazing Maurice before, but Tiffany Aching I've read before and I figure they hold up. Once I'm through that, I have the "Gods of Blood and Powder" trilogy waiting on standby

one of my favorite scenes in the battle. and I loved how it flipped the standard "let the strognest person lead" thing that both the Aes Sedai AND the Ashaman do. by letting the person whose Talents were best suited to the task lead they did a lot more damage.

I try to avoid spoliers, but I don't always remember when stuff gets revealed. sometimes its the same chapter, other times it's books away. and especially in a long series like this one, it's hard to keep it from blending together for me. i'm usually at least a little better about not posting when I'm not sure

my bad

some time back it was mentioned what the Aiel do with Male channelers: once a man realizes he can channel, he goes off alone to the blight to fight the dark one. now you know what happened to them.

I loved that scene. Egwene has basically been queen of the dream (well, among the main characters anyway) for a while, but here comes Perrin just casually showing her up. Don't get me wrong, I think she's probably still better at it overall, but in this case her Aes Sedai training is a hinderance. Perrin doesn't know or care what balefire is and can stop it the same as anything else. Egwene does know what t is and thus has more trouble because she recognizes the power of it. side note: I'm sad we didn't get more Perrin/Egwene dream world interactions before this.

the Humans certainly didn't get full nights of sleep - its explicitly stated at some point - and they seemed OK, so presumably the animals are adapted to a similarly broken up sleep schedule, in which case I think this is the most likely answer. gorge on new growth plants in the dawn, then dash into the night for a rest.

yea, it's not an unreasonable place for her to go, I just would have liked to have seen a bit more of the steps leading there. and again, I suspect we would have, if Jordan could have completed the whole thing, but it feels to me like something that was probably missing from transition notes or whatever and ended up being missed. it's not a huge gripe, and I put it down more to the whole process of trying to have one author finish another's work - some things are going to be missed.

I remember feeling like there was probably some missing setup for this - just one of the things that we missed out on due to Jordan's death. when she healed Logain's stilling, she had spent chapters building to it. we knew it was something she was studying and trying. this one just shows up the first time we see her attempt it.

agree with that. it's tricky to map their progress to ours, but I figure worth trying because this the only real baseline we have. for us, that would be an incredibly short time, but they definitely do have advantages. i'm still inclined to lean toward the gap being a bit higher than that, but its not out of the question - it all depends on exactly what paths their tech and science follow. a heavy focus on allomantic and ferruchemical machines would be both a logical in-world choice and go a long way toward resolving the issues of manned spaceflight.

Gravity is mostly an issue for the initial step of getting off-world, and the food/water/air issues are mostly related to the gravity one. the hardest part about traveling between stars is the distance and time and fuel for slowing down at the other end. at lightspeed even the closest stars are years away - it would take almost 7 years to get the first signal from a ship travelling there at approximately lightspeed, and that sort of signal delay slows down space research. you say FTL with speed bubbles, but it isn't clear how that would work, or how much metal they would need to make it work for something as massive as a starship over the course of an entire voyage - its a completely different scale than an individual allomancer in a single fight. certainly Wayne and Marasi weren't capable of anything close to that level in terms of either size or dilation or duration. that isn't to say it doesn't work, but if there is a way to make that work, that breakthrough still needs to happen. and then you need to take all of those individual things and scale them to the size of a ship which is non-trivial, and in some cases make sure they work together correctly. and that's just the cosmere-specific side of things. its also not clear where their basic physics knowledge is, because even with investiture to help, you still need basic physics for things like plotting courses and working out interstellar distances, and determining that you need all that other stuff. nothing impossible, but its all going to take years to work out, even accounting for them having allomancy and ferruchemy to help. and again once they get that all worked out, its still decades to get from there to the point where they have numerous offworld outposts and inclusion in treaties.

the biggest thing they have over us is the existence of investiture as a potential power source - which is huge, and would definitely speed things up. mass and time manipulation both also help, especially the former. that said, part of the speed for getting to where they are in era 2 is that TLR was suppressing a lot of stuff, like gunpowder, that they basically would have been able to make before without his interference. I doubt they have that advantage for space travel. though I did realize a bit ago that I forgot to account for the fact that the Malwish are a bit more technologically advanced than the Basin. they are probably equivalent to the US in the 20s or 30s - basic flight and working on something along the lines of nuclear power (Ettmetal) but haven't quite cracked it yet, if memory serves. so that should probably be the tech baseline we use for Scadrial at the end of Era 2. but also bear in mind that by The Sunlit Man, they had been doing the space travel stuff for quite a while. Sig knows what he is going to find behind the door because the same thing exists across the Cosmere and he has encountered them before. so this isn't just going from Era 2 tech to spacefaring; it's that gap plus probably at least a couple decades for them to establish themselves as enough of a power to have scientific outposts on minor planets and to be included in major space treaties.

thankfully, too, since Mat has a lot more to do in this one. he basically only had a check-in appearance in Gathering Storm

seems more likely to be the Forsaken. 13 of them total, and by the beginning of Towers of Midnight, only 6 remain alive: Moghedien, Lanfear/Cyndane, Mesaana, Graendal, Ishamael/Moridin, and Demandred.

he's got another Novella coming out? huh, I wasn't aware. I'll have to pick it up at some point. Slow Regard is fantastic as is The Lightning Tree.

the black ajah reveal is just the tip of the iceberg for Verin Mathwin.