Sunbird

Ok random question for you, @Jondesu... Is the J in your name pronounced like the J in jar or the Y in yellow? Ever since I heard Brandon say Jasnah's name with the yellow consonant I question my pronunciation of any unfamiliar word spelled with a J. Also I like to listen to Christmas music year-round too.

@Ecthelion III Heh, true. Ok, revised description: Girl becomes the thing she hates but resists becoming a true monster.

I don't think we've figured out yet who isin charge of pizza this month, but this is relevant: it looks like we will have 5 or 6 people, depending on whether @Emerald101 is able to make it. I'm coming, and zas678, little Wilson, and KnightRadiant seem sure of their attendance, plus you, lyssie, makes up to 6.

Virginia has ice cream too! (Is there a state in the USA that doesn't have ice cream?)

I discovered something new that really bothers me today. I was in the middle of going around a turn in my car when I suddenly got the overwhelming urge to sneeze and I was like AHHH NOT NOW I NEED MY EYES OPEN TO DRIVE. I ended up sneezing during the turn despite my attempts to resist, but thankfully my outlandish fear of crashing due to a sneeze didn't come true.

@Quiver Another good guess, but no.

@Delightful As Twi said, he's an actor. There's this theory (no idea who came up with it or how true it is) that every human on earth is connected through relationships with other people to every other person by no more than 6 degrees of separation. So there's a game called 6 Degrees of Kevin Bacon where people try to figure out the relationship chain between them and celebrities--for example, Kevin Bacon.

@TwiLyghtSansSparkles I saw this on Facebook and thought of you.

Yep. Sounds like you'll get along just fine in the summer. I just know whenever my relatives from Utah came out to Virginia to visit my family when I was younger, they would always complain about the humidity even when we long-time Virginia residents didn't think it was all that humid, because Utah is a desert. As for the snow, in most areas of Virginia the snowfall is usually pretty mild. I can only really remember one big snowfall (about a foot deep?) from when I was living in the Richmond area, and I lived there for 12 years, so big snowdumps like that don't happen very often. If you go into the mountainous areas, it's a different story, though. My family spent a few years in the Shenandoah Valley, and one year my high school canceled classes for like 2 weeks straight because the school district covered a large area of rural farmland, and lots of the skinny back roads where the buses were supposed to go to pick kids up off their farms didn't get snowplowed for the longest time. I guess the school officials had this mentality of, "If not every kid can get to the bus and therefore to school, then everybody has to stay home." It would've been nice to have so much time off if it hadn't meant that we had to make up the missed time later...and if the movie theaters hadn't closed too because of the snow.

It's totally doable if you're a fast reader and have enough free time to read. It's the beginning of August 2016 now, so assuming Oathbringer is released sometime in December 2017, that leaves approximately 16 months to read 68 books--that's 4.25 books per month or roughly a book every 6 or 7 days. If my GoodReads is tracking things correctly, I have personally already read 120 books since the start of 2016, and 35 of those were between June 4 and July 30, a period of not quite 2 months. Now, I'll admit that most of my 120 books this year have been in the 300-500 page range and it sounds like several of Straw's goal books are significantly longer than that, but I see no reason why that should be a real obstacle to completing the goal. I've been finishing a regular-size novel about every 2 days, but that kind of breakneck pace isn't necessary to read 68 books by the start of December 2017, so if some of them are longer and a bit more time-consuming it'll still be feasible. As for my goals, I'll probably just do a re-read of the previous two Stormlight books. I've only read them cover-to-cover once each (I know, blasphemy!), so I need it, for sure.

Good guess, but not what I had in mind.

I hope you like Virginia, @The Honor Spren! Depending on where you've been living previously, the high humidity in summer might be a shock, but the scenery is truly beautiful, at least in the areas that I lived. Rolling hills, forests, lakes, rivers--excellent habitat for lots of different wildlife. One neighborhood I lived in had a forested swamp in the middle of it, and you could find raccoons, beavers, snakes, lizards, frogs/toads, and lots of different kinds of birds there, including Pileated Woodpeckers, which are America's largest woodpecker ever since the Ivory-billed, to the best of everyone's knowledge, went extinct 70-ish years ago. Beware, though: when it snows in Virginia, everybody basically loses their minds. School gets canceled when there's like only an inch of snow on the ground, and nobody knows how to drive safely in it unless they have experience from living somewhere like Utah or Idaho, where it snows much more often and more heavily.

Sparks, @Briar King! In that first photo you bear an uncanny resemblance to the actor Christian Kane. (This is a good thing, BTW.) As for me... I am 21 years old, female, Caucasian. I'm 5 feet 5.5 inches tall, which everyone tells me is about average for a woman my age, but I always feel short. (Possibly because I have lots of tall friends.) I could stand to lose some weight--mostly because I love food more than is probably healthy but also partly because the knee surgery I had 3 years ago makes serious exercise kind of a scary prospect for me. I have slightly wavy dark brown hair--when it's wet it looks black--that is currently cut pretty short to keep my head cool and because I don't like having high-maintenance hair. I wear glasses because my natural eyesight is utterly pathetic, but I like the way they look on my face; they're a style that kind of says "sexy librarian" IMO. My eyes are a medium shade of brown, and I tend to get freckles in the summer. My fingers are annoyingly stubby, and store-bought gloves never fit me right without alterations because the fingers are always way too long.

I am also curious for the same reason. Are you going to Langley? IIRC that's where CIA headquarters is.

Hahaha. The phrase "random snakes in the mail" made me think of this XKCD comic: Also this just happened on my Facebook:

Actually there is no such thing as a poisonous snake. Yeah, some of them can bite you and kill you, but they're venomous, not poisonous. Venom is injected like from a bite or sting. Poison gets in your body through skin contact or by eating or drinking, as with poison dart frogs.

@Stormgate I know, right??

When you see this in your Twitter feed and immediately think of the Alethi and their color coded wines.

@Morzathoth And @kaymyth totally agree. Snakes and bats are awesome.

Ok I guess it's my turn. Girl becomes the thing she hates and ends up saving the world. (This describes the series, rather than a single book.)

It's amazing how a panel with no dialogue can pack such a punch. Makes me want to give V a hug.

Lord of the Rings, naturally.

I lived in central Virginia (two different neighborhoods in the Richmond area) for 12 years, so we had some of the same snakes there. Black rat snakes were the most common, plus the occasional copperhead and cottonmouth (or water moccasin if you prefer that name). All the venomous ones in our area were pit vipers with the triangular heads, heat pits in their faces, and slit pupils, and once I knew that I always took a good close look at any snake I came across to figure out how careful I needed to be around it. Lots of times I'd pick up the nonvenomous ones if they were small enough. My mom has several closeup photos of me holding tiny snakes, and whenever she shows them to people they're like, "What?? You let your daughter just pick up snakes??" And then I just chuckle as I imagine how they'd react to a photo of me holding a 4-inch-long praying mantis. (We have several of those, too.) My mom found a garter snake while mowing our lawn once. She caught him and stuck him in a terrarium just long enough to show the rest of the family and keep him out of the way of the lawnmower until she was done, and he was probably the biggest snake I've ever seen in the wild. One summer we found a nest of baby copperheads in our flower bed, and after we knew they were there my mom made me and my brother promise not to go outside without solid, close-toed shoes. That same summer, we went swimming in the neighborhood pool the last day it was open, and right at closing time, after everyone had just gotten out of the water, a smallish snake slithered out of the bushes and into the pool. One of the lifeguards got a net and fished it out, and a crowd of kids huddled around the net to peer down at the snake. And it chose that moment to find a small hole in the net, squeeze through it, and plop onto the pavement in the middle of the circle of kids. You can probably guess what happened next. Utter. Chaos. All the kids scattered, and the lifeguard flipped out too and ended up beating the snake to death with the rim of the net. Looking back on it now, several years later, I feel bad that the snake got killed, but I can't help but laugh at the memory of a dozen barefoot kids running screaming in every direction.

Possibly because Dan doesn't seem to have much of a Facebook presence and because of geographical distance? I've known about this for ages, but since I live in Utah I go to lots of his signings and ask him about it every time I see him. But! The release date is news to me!! AUGUST 26 SEEMS LIKE AN ETERNITY AWAY. I'm frustrated that I can't find any information about what theaters will be participating in the US "limited release", but I Tweeted about it to Dan Wells to see if he knows. And there's no preorder listing for the movie on Amazon's streaming service as of right now either. *grump grump*

Heh. @Briar King That looks like a good-sized snake. Did it survive the encounter with your cat? (Also, roughly where do you live? I'm curious about what kinds of snakes might be found in your area.) Pleasant things in my life today: I got to roast marshmallows over a campfire and make s'mores with a bunch of friends tonight. While I was sitting around the campfire, I saw a White-faced Ibis fly by overhead. @Kestrel especially will probably be interested in this. It's finally my turn on the hold list for a Kindle copy of League of Dragons, the final book in Naomi Novik's Temeraire series!