Dunkum

finished The Burning White on Saturday, then blitzed through books 4, 5, and 6 of the Dresden Files in the last 3 days. now i have a hold placed on book 7, but i'll have to wait up to 2 weeks for that to get resolved. debating whether to look for something else in teh meantime, or to just take a bit of a break until the hold comes through.

yea, thats the one i was looking for

I think its more that there is more going on there than just a standard nicrosilmind. we know they are unkeyed so that they arent tied to a specific person (presumably by storing identity while storing the other traits), and they are also ...i think the term used is unlocked, which somehow allows them to be used even by people without nicrosil ferruchemy - and its definitely not yet clear how that is managed.

yea, that's what I was getting at

not entirely true.

We see at least some aspects of nicrosil ferruchemy in the era 2 mistborn books, so if you haven't already, you should read those. but the short version is that what we've seen so far is that it stores the ability. so someone who is a Feruchemical nicrosil/Allomantic steel twinborn could store the ability to use allomantic steel. however the person tapping that that would still need access to steel to burn in order to use it. likewise someone like a full ferruchemist could store the ability to use iron ferruchemy, and the person tapping would then be able to use that, btu would still need access to iron to use as a metalmind to store their weight. as far as how that works with compounding, presumably it works the same as anything else - you store 1 charge and get 10 back, so you'd be able to access the stored ability 10x as long, or for the same amount of time but almost 10x stronger. in this case, i don't think youd be storign something like an actual steelpush, instead youd be stroing something like x hours of steelpushing at y strength (e.g. spend 1 hour with your steelpushing at 25% strength to store 1 hour of steelpushing at 75% of your normal strength, then compound it to get 10 hours of 75% strength)

about 2/3 of the way through myself. theres a few quibbles I have with it, things that seem like they weren't set up as well as I'd have liked in previous books, but overall i agree

Looking at it again, i think the question was more...if you do something like rapidly age an egg to hatching (similar to using progresssion to grow vines or something) then would you be able to control things like sex of the eventual baby, since that isn't determined when the egg is laid but later in the gestation process. My guess would be that someone sufficiently talented probably could, yes. but i don't have much to back that up with.

We know most cosmere healing works by sort of aligning the physical with the cognitive/spirtual versions of the self. this is why Kaladin's slave brands don't heal for instance, but his tattoos do - he considers the brands to be part of him at this point. so based on that, if an animal changed its sex and was later healed with progression, then its likely that it would retain the new sex, provided it had had it long enough to shift its cognitive image of itself.

Even using conservative estimates (high end for bow, low end for gun, sourced mostly from wikipedida) a rifle bullet is easily 1.5-2x more powerul than an arrow in terms of the amount of kinetic energy it delivers. comparing average to average and the rifle is going to come out looking better still, though i didnt try to calculate those numbers - nor did i try to account for the fact that an arrow is going to lose more of its speed than a bullet is. I believe it also delivers that energy to a smaller area, as you noted, which means its going to be even more effective at causing damage than the above numbers suggest. A Colt .45 actually has higher initial energy than the low-end .22 rifle example (though i suspect the rifle fares better over long dsitances - not doing that research now), so at short range its going to be even more effective. so basically, in any reasonable scenario, a bullet is going to be several times stronger than an arrow, and likley more accurate as well.

I got the feeling that this was in part because they were trying to convey some of the books humor, but a lot of it was the sort of word-play based humor that just doesn't translate when you lift it from the page.

huh? Pretty sure Copperclouds explicitly block emotional allomancy, at least to the user.

well, i havent read or reread any of them in a while, so an hour might actually be short - not really sure. but its a definite drop in quantity compared to the normal installments.

I haven't caught up with volume 2 yet. my biggest problem wiht the white sand volumes is how short they are. it doesn't really satisfy my cosmere fix when it takes less than an hour to read through it

you missed the hyper important point that its the first book with Mat's view point. its incredible how muc hdifference that single fact makes.

Dragon Reborn is better than both of them, IMO, so you have that to look forward to.

yelig nar might die too in this scenario. larkin and nightblood are probably fine, as long as the larkin isn't evil.

It may go further than that, in fact. If memory serves, Kaladin and Dalinar are both resistant to the Thrill, if not completely immune ot it. That was a plot point for Dalinar in the first book, in fact; so it seems like something about the spren bond is shielding them from its effects. and some of the effects we see from it are a lot stronger than most of the emotional allomancy we see in Mistborn. on the other hand, there's Shallan's flashback with Hoid, and him possibly using some kind of emotional allomancy on her...

started playing Final Fantasy X-2 a little while back (got it cheap and figured I'd give it a proper chance), btu pretty much every time I was playing it, I found myself thinking about how much i'd rather just be playing FFX. so i'm now on a new replay of FFX. just got to Kilika, and watched it get wiped out. And not to be unsympathetic (to a group of fictional people), but maybe, just maybe, if there is a god-level giant monster roaming the seas and attacking human settlements, then maybe you shouldn't build your entire village on piers out in the ocean. You'd think someone, at least one single person, would have picked up on that in 1000 years...

the difference between breath and stormligth might be relevant too. Breath is a lot stickier - stormlight will fade from a person over time, while breath generally wont. I also go tthe impression that Vasher's fight was shorter, though I could be wrong about that, but if so it could simply be that if he'd been fighting longer it would have been harder.

This is one of the series' biggest flaws, and it gets old fast.

oh, 12 gambit slots, not 12 options for gambits. yea, that makes more sense. because there are thousands of possible options for each slot. well 12 gambit slots per character, 6 characters any 3 of whcih can be in the party at a given time etc etc

is that somethign that changed in the remake? because I know the original had way more gambits, and i'm about 80% sure gameplay didnt pause for you to chose attacks if you entered them manually.

Its been a while since I played it, and i generally used the gambits, so take this with a grain of salt, but I seem to recall the battle system generally playing out in real time. so I think that if you turned off the gambits you would potentially end up takign several hits while trying to figure out which skill to use. One other thing to note: even when using the gambits, you can interrupt them at any time with a command that usually takes priority over the gambits. the osmose example i gave above for isntance would stop my healer trying to cast a healing spel, which is what her gambit was telling her to do, l while i had her drain mp from one of my non-magic using party members. because i gave it as a command, it supercedes any gambit.

you can turn gambits off entirely if you want. i think outside of the tutorial on it in the beginning, you can probably play the whole game without it, at least in the original version. can't speak to the remake. edit to add: and if it makes a difference, the gambit system isn't exactly AI. its rules you give to your characters on how to attack in various situations, ordered by priority. so it isnt AI making stupid decisions, its characters doing what you tell them to do. my biggest issue with it is that you have to collect the gambits before you can use them, meaning your options are pretty limited early on. but by the end of the game the only times id deviate from the gambits were either rare status ailments that i hadnt bothered to set a gambit for or 1 specific scenario (having my healer use osmose on a party member when her hp was low) that the gambit system couldnt do