Dunkum

Finished City of Golden Shadow first book in Tad Williams's Otherworlds series, but naturally my library doesn't have book 2. Honestly, given where the book leaves off, I am not quite sure how he manages to stretch this out into 4 books...

I can believe that. I remember deflecting guardian beams back into their faces with that shield maneuver you can do, but I'm pretty sure I'd need a lot of practice to get the timing on that right after months away - practice that would probably get me killed a few times over, given how much damage those beams do..

If you do pick up Breath of the Wild again, I'd be interested to know how it feels to go back to it after a long break. I did finish it, and while I loved it, I havent picked it back up, even for the expansions. my biggest concern was that the replay value would be next to nothing, since so much of the thrill of the game came from the exploration. be interesting to see if at least some of that thrill comes back with enough time off.

I think I liked the Sarantium books a bit better than Lions, but it was pretty good - though he has some quirks that he indulges in in that one to the point that they started distracting me, and I don't tend to do deep reads, so if i'm noticing patterns in the writing it is because they are blatant.

it is easily my favorite of what I have read by him.

I'm not sure this is true. I'm pretty sure when we've seen Kaladin swear one of his oaths that he commented on how certain things seemed to get easier for him. I'd have to dig pretty hard to pull up a citation for that, though.

sure but age accumulates in a way that breaths do not. lets say you breathe 1 million times per year (no idea what the actual number is, but not really important). in that case, if you want to go a year without breathing, you need 1,000,000 breaths stored (or really 1 year's worth of breath stored). to go 2 years you need 2,000,000, for 10 years you need 10,000,000. but age doesn't work that way. If TLR wanted to be eternally 40 years old, then on his 41st birthday, he'd have to be constantly tapping 1 year worth of age,so he has to have, for that day, 1 days worth of 1 year of age stored up (that is a really weird unit of measurement, by the way - the amount of stored age you need to be 1 year younger for 24 hours), but on his 42nd birthday, he'd need to have twice that much, slightly more in fact, since we know from Sazed that tapping more of a trait at once induces some loss (annoyingly Sazed called this concept - tapping greater and greater amounts of a trait for a shorter time - compounding, but that term obviously won't work in this context). so 2 days worth fo 1 year of age wouldn't be sufficient, it would have to be fractionally more than that to account for the loss. so to go 2 years without aging, he need to tap over 3 years worth of 1 year of age (an even more awkward unit of measurement somehow - the amount fo stored age you need to be 1 year younger for 365 days). to go 3 years, he need 6 years worth of 1 year of age, plus the fraction to absorb the loss. to go a full 10 years he needs 55 years worth of 1 year of age compared to breaths where he just needed 10 years worth of breaths. it increases quadratically ([y*(y+1)]/2 is the actual equation where y is the number of years), while breaths or nutrients increase linearly. Also, eventually that fractional loss from tapping more of the trait at once is going to matter. in order to get to the time of mistborn era 1 TLR had to tap something like half a million years worth of 1 year of age, not including the overhead for tapping so much at once. and yes, I am aware that he doesn't need a full year of age on the first day after his 40th birthday in order to not age, but that doesn't alter the math too too much. trying to account for the fractional years and fractional days wasn't worth it, so I didn't bother, but ultimately you arrive at a similar end point. anyway, the real limit for TLR in terms of compounding age was always going to be the amount of available atium - since the amount of atium he would have to burn to prevent himself from aging would increase quadratically as the years passed.

yea, pretty much. normal ferruchemy is limited to what you can store, compounding allows you to overcome that limit. a gold compounder can heal from pretty much anything as long as they have metalminds available. A cadmium compounder would literally never have to breathe again once they started compounding...as long as they had a supply of cadmium. and likewise a bendalloy compounder could theoretically go without eating for as long as they want, provided they have the metal. etc.

Compounding works by exploiting the power source for allomancy to provide ferruchemical traits. basically ferruchemy usually only allows you to get out what you put in, but if you burn a metalmind, it sort of tricks the allomancy into providing a ferruchemical trait instead of its normal allomantic one (like copper providing memory instead of creating a coppercloud). however because the actual power for allomancy comes from outside the user (from the Preservation's shard) when you burn a metalmind you end up getting about 10x out of it as you put in. most of the time you would then store most of this back into a new metalmind, which you can also later burn etc. the end result is thta if you can compound a metal, you have access to effectively infinite amounts of the trait you can store.

Well think of all the stuff that still has to happen, and realize that it only has 4 or 5 more books to happen in (forget the actual count). Things definitely pick up steam, if only because they have to.

Pretty sure Bendalloy can be used to store specific nutrients, i think it works a lot like Tin where you store one specific facet to a specific metalmind (though do we know if that is a requirement, or just how Sazed liked to do it to keep things organized?). the difference then would be that a coppermind stores any/all memories together, not just one memory per metalmind. so even if bendalloy is specific nutrients, i think they are generally being stored in a different way than copper does. also, regarding the imprinting whole intellect question, remember that compounding comes up when you retrieve the attribute, not while you are storing, so all that added investiture just gives you more stuff to store, but doesn't change how or what you are storing. I can't imagine that there is a way to take that (pre-formed) investiture and turn it into something more complicated than it was when you started. I think if you wanted to do something like copy your whole mind to a coppermind you would have to completely lose all memory of yourself....

Eye of the World and The Great Hunt are my least favorites (yes even worse than Crossroads of Twilight - the mere presence of Mat goes a long long way), but Dragon Reborn is easily the best in the series.

He has also had a lot longer to practice his craft than she has.

Shallan is further along than Kaladin. At the end of WoR she was one oath/equivalent ahead of Kaladin (source), and based on what we see in that book, she should be one ahead of him at the end of WoK too, since I think we only see 1 particularly revalatory truth there.

whats more interesting is that at that point he was only on his second oath, whereas Kaladin had to wait for his 3rd to be able to summon syl as a shardblade.

I ended up watching through it (easy enough when it is only 6 episodes on a rainy sunday afternoon) and I gotta say those quotes roughly capture everythign I felt about it. It was alright, but nowhere near the original. which is unfortunaltely about what I expected.

It is definitely something I have been considering grabbing for my Wii U...if only I still had the time to play it. Don't think I've played a video game in weeks, other htan little flash/unity games online.

Been a while since I watched much anime, in teh past few years I'll rarely pick up a show. but I happened on the Adult Swim/Toonamie produced follow ups to Fooly Cooly (aka FLCL to some) and I was curious if anyone had watched it/had any opinion on it? I liked the original back when I first caught it staying up too late on summer nights, but the thought of a follow up leaves me both hopeful and pessimistic.

beyond what was mentioned before about investiture interferign with investiture, we do know that Bronze can be used to detect other forms of investiture beyond just those native to Scadrial, so it would stand to reason that copper would offer protetction against them as well. I don't know that we have anything confirmed, though someone with a better handle on pulling up WoBs may be able to find something.

it would have to, yes. I don't think it is impossible for a shardblade to do that.

We certainly haven't seen anything directly. but I'm pretty sure Brandon has confirmed that Nightblood is more invested than a shardblade. though I suppose it is possble that even he couldn't stop one.

So there is a very good chance that the in-world explanation of rotspren causing disease is backwards. at the very least, even in book there are at least a few people asking the general question of whether the spren are the cause, or if they are just attracted to their various things: so do rotspren cause rot, or are they attracted to it? and do the mediciens then keep the rotspren away directly, or do they kill bacteria and prevent the rotspren from being attracted in the first place? it is a somewhat open question at this point. also, shard-scalpel would probably be a bad idea. for one thing, it would take 2 cuts, since the first cut would kill flesh, but wouldn't open the body, so you'd need a second cut to be able to see what you were doing. for a second I'm pretty sure those cuts would never heal (without some investiture working on them, anyway). as far as a shard-razor killing bacteria on your skin, it seems like it would be possible.

Kale isn't boring...it's too disgusting to be boring

with maybe an added message abotu how boring lettuce is

Off the top of my head: in the 3rd or 4th episode he tries to drop down in front of a woman's bathroom window while she is showering. in the fight with Dominique the Cyclops, he shoots off her buttons and tells her he could have groped her. I vaguely recall there being others, but I can't remember the specifics right now. It drops off in the second half of the series, which focuses more on the action, and where he is more and more romantically linked to Meryl, but early on he is definitely a creep.