PeterAhlstrom

The troll song also helps explain the end. "People make bad choices if they're mad, or scared, or stressed, but throw a little love their way and you'll bring out their best."

The length of the year is one thing we were talking about. You have more information than you have realized you have.

I cry in movies all the time, but that did it it for me too. So did "Do You Want to Build a Snowman," and so did the end. Even though I saw what Anna would do coming from a mile away, for me it was done perfectly.

Yeah, sorry, I looked more closely at what you wrote and maybe you didn't miss anything after all. I think it's safe to say that with an orbital distance between that of the Earth and Mars, assuming a planetary density somewhere between Earth's and Mars's is a fairly good bet. Except that I'm not at all certain Roshar's sun has the same mass as our sun—in fact it very likely does not for various reasons. And I haven't spent enough time looking into how that will affect things.

Kaladin may no longer get another book. Also, Brandon is pretty good at judging how many books it will take to fit the needs of the story, but it's not outside the realm of possibility something could change. We are still at the beginning of a long sequence, and as he gets farther along it's possible for things to shift around. However, at this point I fully expect that it will end up as 10 books just like he has said.

Four Roshar months is 200 Roshar days. Also, the radius calculation doesn't look right to me at all. But yes, we do think about this kind of thing. You should see my equirectangular and azimuthal equidistant map projections. Except you won't, not anytime soon.

My interest in linguistics is mostly of a practical, real-world nature. I loved nearly all of my courses, but my final semester of the bachelor's degree I took classes that made me realize the upper-level stuff was really theoretical, divorced from reality, and unappealing to me. Thankfully, I was also minoring in English with an editing emphasis, so I could go into editing for a career.

Most of Brandon's signings are 3 hours or more, and I don't expect that to change on this tour. Brandon will be going to Calgary in August, but it looks like Omaha is closer to Winnipeg than Calgary is. He's going to Calgary because a convention there invited him as guest of honor and is flying him out. He tries to go to one convention per month during the warm part of the year. 2014 is full and 2015 is nearly full at this point. Conventions should start inviting him for 2016. He was invited to Calgary 2014 back in November 2012.

The Words of Radiance ebook probably won't drop to $9.99 until it's been out for a year. And it probably won't drop lower than that for a few years afterward. Though it's possible Amazon could discount it below cost at any time, since they're legally allowed to do that now. I still don't have any word on whether the book will be in the Kindle MatchBook program. Most Tor books aren't.

My degree is in linguistics. Maybe you are at the wrong school. Michael & Kate use a different phonetic transcription method, so lately I've been writing things like ā'dō•lĭn.

Lift is in final form there. The Taravangian snippet from earlier last year is not near final. The other readings like Ym are not final.

I'm still not perfectly happy with Olaf, but now I feel he adds more to the movie than he takes away. He is admittedly great for the little kids, and the added depth of meaning that I've found in the movie mostly comes from reanalyzing Olaf in a way that I'm convinced is entirely intended by the filmmakers. So, on the surface he doesn't work for me—but I think his surface is meant just for the kids. His depth works for me and that's almost enough to counteract my surface impression. And he's way less annoying than Eddie Murphy.

Maybe it was tl;dr, but my view of Olaf changed drastically the more I thought about it. My January 23 and 30 additions go into this with the most depth. Disney has done these things before. It's been a long time since I saw Hunchback, but I remember the opening montage to be very long and just amazing, musically. Maybe I'm remembering wrong but in Tangled it seems the only major singing in the second half was the "see the light" song. Also in Pocahontas the opening number was very much the "Broadway chorus" opening like Frozen and Les Mis. I do think the music was a bit unbalanced, but I can also see that they may have felt that more music would have been distracting in the more intense later scenes. This would not be acceptable in a Broadway musical, but I think it's OK in this type of movie.

Hey, that's some pretty good IPA there.

Hahaha, wow, that is immensely silly.

I do have to admit that this movie has an element of sentimental melodrama that just gets me every time. The tween mermaid movie Aquamarine had the same ending as Frozen, and I loved it there too. Also I think Hans is a bit more complex than comes off onscreen—up until the scene by the fireplace, he is actually trying to play the role; he wants her to like him, and he wants the citizens to like him, so he's being a pretty nice guy. But once he realizes that saving Anna would require him to really be in love with her, he drops the act and decides to salvage what he can from the operation, going a bit over the top in the other direction because he feels the whole thing falling apart around him. I can totally accept lots of people liking Tangled better. But I don't see the complexity or depth there. That doesn't mean Frozen is automatically better—complexity for complexity's sake leads to things like the TV show Lost—but it means that I can appreciate Frozen on more levels than I do Tangled, which, at the time, was certainly the best Disney movie I had seen in years. So much better than the Princess and the Frog, for goodness' sake. And don't get me started on Home on the Range; what an execrable travesty.

That only works with the Emperor's Soul and Legion, with the US editions. We retained ebook rights for those. We don't have the right to distribute any other ebooks ourselves.

The truth about Hans is hinted at right from the beginning, and the resolution is perfect. There are certainly some places where it's trying to be like Tangled (Sven tries to be Maximus; also, the art style of Tangled was inspired by the Rococo painting The Swing—a version of which appears in Anna's paintings-poses scenes). (And as far as aesthetically beautiful, occasionally the snow is just not animated like snow.) But I've already given my reasons why Frozen is superior to Tangled.

Okay, we watched 3 episodes of Sword Art Online, and it's soooo bleak. Is it going to stay depressing? It's funny that the voice actor for Mutta from Space Brothers does a side character (Klein). He was also the voice actor for the main character of Tiger & Bunny. Which is an awesome corporate-sponsored superheroes anime, if no one has mentioned that yet. Tiger & Bunny is definitely one of the best animes I've watched in the past two years. And he is the voice of Sanji in One Piece, which actually makes me more interested in One Piece. He is quite a good actor.

Brandon is not planning to go to WorldCon this year; his schedule right around there is just too tight. However, there's still a chance he will stop by London on his way to or from Spain. The Huntington Beach signing should be at least 3 hours, but the talking part is all within the first hour. The bookstore in Oslo was Outland Kirkegata. If they want to invite him again, 2014 is full and 2015 is filling up.

Brandon did go to Norway once, to a bookstore in Oslo. It's even possible he will go back in the future, but maybe in a few years. Also he went to Canada multiple times last year: Vancouver, Toronto, and Halifax. This year he is going to Calgary in August, for When Words Collide.

Too many musical numbers? Ha, I think it has too few. The last song we get is the troll song, and I could have used at least one more song later. (There's a concept reprise on the 2nd CD of the soundtrack that was well placed.) I love the way the beginning of the movie is mostly songs, and I want to see this as a full-blown Broadway musical with way more singing. The moment when Elsa takes down her hair may be the single most powerful moment in any Disney movie. The only thing I can think of to compare to it is when Mulan climbs the pole. And It's very interesting to contrast the two: Mulan is proving she's a "man." Elsa is showing she's a woman, her own woman, and not a princess at all. She is a queen. The question of whether she's gay, who knows? But if Olaf is her subconscious, he gives some evidence that Elsa doesn't care about men. Before he sings about summer, he looks at Kristoff and says "Who's the weird-looking donkey?" or whatever it is that he says. If this is not purely meant for humor—and since nearly everything Olaf does has a greater meaning, it may not be—it indicates Elsa doesn't pay much attention to men at this point in her life. I'm not convinced on this, but it's something to think about. I do love Tangled for its portrayal of a severely emotionally abused person. Tangled barely has any missteps at all for what it is, and Maximus may be the best animal ever on screen. But I feel like Tangled was pretty much all on the surface, and Frozen is deeper and more complex (I've been thinking about it and reevaluating it for days after seeing it, whereas my judgment of Tangled is still exactly what it was when I walked out of the theater). Frozen also turns so many tropes on their head, while Tangled doesn't really, and I appreciate the trope-turning (and no one dies at the end!). I also have a much more powerful and visceral emotional reaction to Frozen, and my emotional response is what I value most in a movie or book.

In this case, the pronunciations in the first audiobook are pretty much right, and the pronunciations in the second audiobook will be even more right. Renarin's name is emphasized on the second syllable. Adolin is emphasized on the first syllable, which is a "long" A. However, Brandon also says people can pronounce the names however they like.

Not a giveaway.

Major spoilers, so don't read if you haven't seen it. Here are some posts I made elsewhere showing the evolution of my thoughts on the movie, especially the snowman. January 20: Saw Frozen. I liked a ton of things about it, but that snowman made it a much worse movie. The snowman was definitely getting a lot of laughs in the kid-heavy theater crowd. But the movie could have done without it and just played up the reindeer more if they needed more comic relief. The more I think about the movie the more I like it. It does some great stuff with trope subversion. I'd love to see a version without the snowman though. The snowman was not quite as annoying as Eddie Murphy. His character was not deliberately annoying like that. It was annoying for largely meta reasons. There were actual in-world reasons for the way the snowman acted; it's not a snarky sidekick character. The snowman may not have bothered me as much if I'd seen the movie ten years ago. January 21: I saw the movie again today. (we were doing individual daddy/daughter days.) and my opinions were confirmed. And I like all the songs. I like the movie a lot. I'm just going to pretend there is no Olaf. January 23: I've been thinking about Frozen a lot, and I've decided that although the snowman Olaf does feel like a non sequitur in many scenes, he's not bolted on to the movie but was always intended to play the role he plays at the end. Some spoilers. Olaf has a reason to know things about love—he is the embodiment of Elsa & Anna's relationship that could have been. For years Anna has been begging Elsa to spend time with her, and what she always says is "Do you want to build a snowman?" And the truth is that Elsa desperately wants to. When she finally lets loose and starts using her powers, Olaf is one of the very first things she makes. She unconsciously imbues her love for Anna into his personality, in the first moment she stops repressing her feelings. So I have to accept Olaf, though I do think he could have been done a bit differently. I also really like how the movie doesn't go and say outright that Elsa is really the one whose heart has been frozen for years. She was doing what she was doing out of her love for Anna—but it was the wrong thing to do, and it turned to fear, which made everything worse. There's not much from the Hans Christian Anderson story the Snow Queen in the movie, but one sibling teaching the other not to repress feelings is the important thing that made the transition. January 28: I love this movie so much. I didn't see it until last week when I took my oldest daughter to it, and then the next day I took her younger sister. I'm going to have to think about it some more, but this may possibly surpass the Little Mermaid as my favorite Disney movie (I saw that 7 times in the theater when it came out, and haven't seen any other movie in a theather more than 3 times). And I'll have to watch the Hunt for Red October again to see if Frozen surpasses it as my favorite movie of all time. This is interesting to me because there are a couple of things I dislike about Frozen, whereas of recent movies I see Tangled as nearly flawless. But the emotional reaction I get to Frozen puts it so high up on my list. January 30: This is yet another post about the snowman in Frozen. It contains major spoilers, so if you haven't seen the movie yet (Karen), ignore this. I've done a bit more thinking on this, trying to explain some things, and I've come to a few more insights. The more I think about this, the more I think this stuff was intentional on the part of the filmmakers. I said or implied before that Olaf is an embodiment of Elsa's subconscious, which she imbued in him in the moment of his creation. This is in more ways than the one I pointed out before, that he embodies her relationship with Anna—who always wanted to build a snowman with her, and she always wanted to say yes but held herself back. 1. Olaf's desire for summer The first major thing Olaf does is sing about what summer would be like, after saying, "I've always loved the idea of summer." Olaf has been in existence for less than a day. How could he "always" have loved the idea of summer? It's because Elsa has been freezing her emotions for years, and she unconsciously has wanted to get away from that. She desperately wants summer in her life—she wants to thaw, but is sure she never can. 2. Olaf the love expert When Olaf made the comment "You know, I consider myself to be a love expert," it seemed like a throwaway line. Far from it. Olaf represents everything that Elsa knows or thinks she knows about love. When Olaf talks to Anna about love at the end, how it's putting someone else's needs before yours, this is Elsa's understanding of love. But Olaf's (and Elsa's) understanding of love is still imperfect. When Olaf sees Kristoff coming back, he says, "Oh, I guess he doesn't love you after all." That also seemed like just a funny line, but it's much more than that. Elsa thinks that love is ALL about self-sacrifice—she's been shutting herself away for years, keeping herself apart from the people she loves. At the end when Anna sacrifices herself for Elsa and Elsa realizes that Anna loves her, she also realizes that love is not just keeping yourself from hurting the ones you love, but love is going to the one you love and being with them when they need you. And in that moment when Elsa realizes that love will thaw, summer returns to her life for the first time in forever.