PeterAhlstrom

Oh right, I wanted to mention another series of CJ Cherryh's. If you liked Brandon's story Sixth of the Dusk, then you should read CJ Cherryh's Rider at the Gate and Cloud's Rider. These two books have a magic system very similar to Sixth of the Dusk. Technically they are science fiction, in that it's a lost colony of humans who are stuck on an alien planet, but it's not very technological at all. Instead of psychic birds, there are psychic horses. Like the birds in Sixth of the Dusk, the horses mask the minds of the people from the predators in the wild who can sense minds.

I love Uprooted so much. It's a very different type of book from her Temeraire books, but it's also very different from something like Brandon's books. I really liked Blood's Pride by Evie Manieri. I haven't gotten to the next book yet but it's on my to-read pile. Los McMaster Bujold mainly writes great fun science fiction, but her fantasies are also very good. Definitely read The Curse of Chalion and Paladin of Souls. Chalion made me cry harder than any book I've ever read, and Paladin is all-around a bit better book (and won the Hugo). Her Sharing Knife books are also quite good, though more relationship-focused (still, the magic & villain-force-of-nature is very cool), but you must consider the four books to actually be two books that each got split in half. They're not quite as satisfying individually. Robin Hobb got mentioned; her Liveship books are my favorite. They have a broader scope, a more epic feel, which may appeal more to Brandon fans than the Fitz books. CJ Cherryh mostly writes science fiction but her Fortress fantasy books are also very good. Fortress in the Eye of Time is the first one; it takes a while to get into but it really pays off. (I found her Russian fantasy books starting with Rusalka to be a bit too opaque for me.) Her Foreigner series is fantasy-like science fiction and is now at 16 books. (I only read the first 4 or so.) I love love Tooth and Claw by Jo Walton, which is about dragon society. I didn't like her book Among Others, which is about being a teenager who loves to read science fiction books (plus some thrown-in magic). Those are the only two of hers I've read so far. I thought N.K. Jemisin's 100,000 Kingdoms was excellent, but I haven't gotten to her other books yet.

General comments.

I really enjoy reading the Food Wars manga in Viz's Shonen Jump, so I had been looking forward to the anime. Unfortunately, directorial choices are highlighting issues that I gloss over while reading, like excessive "male gaze." Also, the "disrobing" that I see as quirky in the manga becomes very creepy. They're just dwelling on it in the anime, when in the manga there's one (large) panel. We've seen two episodes, but probably won't watch more, at least not together. I do want to get the early part of the story, but maybe I should just buy the manga volumes. We also finally watched one episode of Nobunagun. Entertaining enough to see another, and I like the art style. We've watched a little more of Baby Steps and while the plot is decent for what it is, the low-budget art is bothering me more. Most of the characters have just totally flat one-color hair, and it's really lazy. We watched I think 3 episodes of Gargantia on the Verdurous Planet on Netflix. I like a lot of things about it. Though the planet is really much more aqueous than verdurous.

A note, we do have an official mobile app in the works. Isaac is most involved, so I'm not sure of its current development status.

I am personally not aware of any such actual societal or cultural context, and have never heard it used that way myself, but are you so certain you can make this claim? Vaidd says above that it is often used exactly that way.

Sorry.... >_>

We finished Yowamushi Pedal's second season. I did enjoy it quite a bit, but goodness, this is the epitome of shonen anime drag-out. Do not go into the second season expecting the Inter-High race to finish up quickly. The end stretched probability, but I didn't mind. I liked the way they set it up. If this series comes back for another season sometime down the road, I'll definitely watch it. I do really like the characters. But I hope a future season has a lot more plot than this season. And, upon finishing that up, we started the tennis anime Baby Steps. The character designs on this did not (apparently) make a particularly good transition from the manga—there's something super weird with the main character's hair. However, his personality is extremely interesting to see in a series like this. This is as close to an autism spectrum main character as I've ever seen in an anime, and it's refreshing. We also reached the halfway point of Aldnoah Zero. Was not expecting what happened. We're not sure if we'll continue. But maybe.

Relevant: what it says on the back cover of Words of Radiance.

We might be able to get the important audio parts recorded when Michael is recording the next Mistborn books late this summer. The ebook (at least in the US) has been updated. If you have the ebook and your copy didn't get updated, you may need to contact the customer service of your ebook company. Like WeiryWriter said, all of the mass market paperbacks are the revised version. No idea when the hardcover will get updated. Depends on reprints.

Brandon is also putting out new versions of the Legion and Skin Deep hardcovers. Maybe as early as next week. We're just waiting for them to come back from the press.

Ponies are cool. Deal with it! Do you like The Music Man? Watch this: Do you have fond memories of Don Music on Sesame Street? Watch this:

He went and watched the Avengers right before writing the final 5 chapters.

Okay. We finally watched the last two episodes of Log Horizon season 2. (Crunchyroll was behaving enough that it didn't freeze.) And I didn't like this season nearly as much as I liked the first season. For one, the early arcs in this season were too drawn out. Secondly, after that there were too many characters showing up. Toward the end maybe a third of the time I felt like I didn't know anyone onscreen, much less their motivations. I wonder how much of this is a fault in the adaptation—would it make more sense if I read the novels this is based on? Or do those also suffer from character sprawl without sufficient time to understand what's going on? If there's a third season I may watch it eventually, but I won't be excited about it like I was about the start of this season.

Brandon leaves the percentage bar to me, and I couldn't update it until I woke up. Less than a chapter. He'll probably start from scratch when he gets back to it.

He's in the home stretch. He may finish before going to sleep tonight. The end of a book usually goes quickly.

The art is being worked on constantly. We're nearing the halfway point for the art for volume 1. (That doesn't include coloring.) I haven't done the math to see when the trend line will get to the end of the volume.

That thread was essentially the first time this was discussed in public. As for me, I didn't notice Hoid until the Warbreaker chapters and the Liar of Partinel chapters were coming out at the same time.

Log Horizon season 2 gets more into the people who are upset to be away from their real lives. However, it's also simply more confusing with not understanding new characters' backstories and motivations. I still enjoy it though. We finished watching Steins;Gate. We re-watched episode 1 before watching the final 4 episodes, and that was a good choice. Really helped cement things. What a great show! I mean, there are some continuity things that I can object to, but overall I really liked it. It's one of the best-planned single-season anime that I've ever watched. We haven't seen the OVA episode and the movie. The OVA is available for FUNimation members (which we're not), but I don't see a good legal way to watch the movie online. Someday I definitely want to see these though.

Frustrated. We've been having bad problems with Crunchyroll in the last week and haven't been able to watch anything. (Except some more episodes of Steins;Gate on Viewster.) Testing today during the day the streaming seems to be working fine. So it seems the problem is only at night...

Did you guys see these videos from Sharjah? https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCdcwHCgcTYdpDIafKypTMQg/videos He is talking slowly in these, so it should make it easier to transcribe! (If you want.)

Remember what Prof said happened to the school he taught at?

This. It's very simple. I open the Word doc and do a word count to see how many thousand words it is. Then I type in that number for the percentage. For a Stormlight Archive book I divide the number by 3 or 4 to arrive at the percentage. Though occasionally Brandon wants to publicly lie about the completion percentage, like when he was writing The Bands of Mourning when he should have been writing Shadows of Self. Then I just ask Brandon what number he wants me to put, and I type it in. So, when it said 50% done on Shadows of Self, this could have really meant that Shadows of Self was 40% done and The Bands of Mourning was 60% done.

We finished watching Shirobako. Such a great show! All about the love of making anime, clearly by people who love making anime. The conclusion was very satisfying, and the last two episodes had some great action scenes that were hilarious.

Finished watching Your Lie in April last night. Oh man, I loved this show so much. It walked the line of being too depressing, but rarely strayed too far over it. And the last episode was perfect. This really was a great show and I highly recommend it. 22 episodes.