Hoiditthroughthegrapevine

Hello fellow travelers, thanks for joining me for Travel with Stick Reeves, I'm your host Stick Reeves, and today we are going to be discussing one of my favorite spots to visit for magical sightseeing on a budget. Tucked away, in a small self contained Unidimensional pocket of space, is a fabulous little planet, IHOP VII, which I found to be quite unique in its pairing of the Gastronomic and Thaumaturgical arts. As you may know, Unidimensional destinations in the Omegaverse (or Macrosmos as some travel writers call it), are more demanding in that time travel is impossible, so I suggest you really nail down your itinerary prior to travel as after the fact adjustments are strictly out of the question. While denizens of every region of the Omegaverse are rightly aware of the mastery exhibited by IHOPians in the construction and decoration of luxury commodes, few but the initiated ever realize that their true genius lies in their preparation, garnishment and magical application of pancakes and the sundry closely related sweet and savory staples of breakfast and brunch repasts. While on a recent journey to the largest metropolis on IHOP VII, New Bread Pudding, I had the distinct good fortune to visit the Tower of Blintzes during an Adamantine Chef battle. Similar in construction to that famous Terran puzzle known as the Tower of Hanoi, the Tower of Blintzes is composed of 3 narrow 700 foot tall towers over which 64 pancake shaped 10 foot tall floating buildings of increasing diameter can be stacked, but always obeying the principle that a larger building can never be stacked over a smaller building. Every hour the buildings shift position in the purported aim of moving from the Easterly tower to the Westerly tower. While this might seem intimidating, rest assured the elevators in the central towers are well aware of the prescribed motion of the buildings, and only very rarely has an unsuspecting tourist exited the elevator to their rather grisly death. Being a travel writer of some reknown, I had the great fortune to be a celebrity judge on the tasting panel for the Adamantine Chef competition, where the foremost practitioners of Culinary Breakfast Magic compete for the title of Prime Chef, the 2nd highest office in all of IHOPian society. This was a transformative, religious experience for me, and to be honest reality for me has never been the same since. The principles of their magic system are really quite fascinating and it's no wonder why IHOP VII has become a Mecca for Bohemians, Philosophers and Religious enthusiasts alike. A practioner of Culinary Breakfast Magic not only strives for perfection in the mundane preparation of the food, but they in fact simultaneously work to create an immersive experience that the consumption of their pancake illicits. The masters of this craft produce ephemeral works of transcendant kinesthetia, where the pairing of flavor, texture, and creative intent transport the gourmand to exalted planes of being. I once ate a street crepe that was so profoundly cast along the principles of breakfast magic that I now know the taste of the color mauve, and how the sound of the coo of a dove feels against the back of my neck (suprisingly it's a lot like the texture of alligator skin, but slimy like a slug). A word of caution is in order, just as the high practitioners of their craft can transport your senses to exalted and unimagined planes of being, the poor practitioners can transport you to most decidely unpleasant planes of being. I once tried a Danish that was so foul I found, to my horror, that I experienced the full sensory array of Barry Manilow's Copa Cabana. It smelled like a latrine, it felt like a mass of wriggling slimy pasta noodles, and I HEARD the music. I definitely recommend eating at Zagnut rated establishments during your stay at IHOP VII. Next up, a colleague of mine recently had quite the experience with: Glove Magic

Here's a chipper little number I call Tell Me About The Future Alexa... A fount of red sprays across the robots chrome shell. Every heartbeat leaks life. Over the fading wasteland of asphalt and steel his mind projects daisies in a grassy field. A metal cockroach crossing his face blocks the robot's reflection in his dead eyes.

Poor Clown The spinning object wobbles, it's eccentric motion plays out like all tragedies. A small perturbation causes the deviation from its perfect rotation. The orbit becomes sloppier, the inevitable bad end foretold in the spiraling disorder. The wobbling pie falls from the pole, real tears trickle over painted ones.

Achhhew! Thanks for that... Granted. Your perfect replica of Gandalf's staff was created using carbon nanotubes. It's a quality item built to withstand the most rigorous of LARP type battle scenarios, unfortunately its only .17 mm thick (about the thickness of a human hair) and 2.5 mm tall, so the only epic battles you can really have with it are against springtails and pseudoscorpions. I wish for something that no one has ever wished for.

Well, if it gets all of the dandelions I guess I could live with that (just kidding) Granted. You get a dense but radiant muffin with a quarter ounce of pooted forth green rosette of icing, straight from Frank Zappa's laboratory at The Utility Muffin Research Kitchen. I wish for a t-shirt cannon.

Solving Xeno's Paradox I walk across the room to the door, now I'm halfway there. From the halfway point to the door I walk, now I'm halfway between those two points. Knowing I'll never reach the door, I do the sensible thing and take a nap. But I'm only half-asleep.

It was a hard vote, your roasts were both great! I have to get some microwave popcorn for the next round, I could have set the bag of popcorn on this line and it would have popped for sure! Yowch! Or I could have popped some more on this solid burn Looking forward to the next round!

The Power of Love He saw her again. He heard the blood in his ears and his vision swam. An electrical jolt shivered his spine, tingled his fingers. What a feeling! Looking at his phone, to his surprise, her powers of seduction by induction got his battery to 100 percent.

Easy says the Nightwatcher as she hands you a copy of Peter Sclemihl by Aldebert Von Chamisso. You no longer have a shadow and if you want to find out why that's bad read the book. I wish for a type IV biochromatic entity, specifically a trowel that has been awakened with the command "Destroy dandelions in my yard".

Remember the Times Twenty four times he tipped his hat, twelve times their wallets were snatched. Twelve times he knocked, six times she wished he would leave. Six times she cracked an egg, three times she belched when the omlette was gone. Two times he died, one time for good.

All very interesting, I really like @R J's Knot of Woes from the previous thread. If the in world book is by a Shin, which would make a lot of sense, it might be something more poetic. Kingdom of Windless Tremors Killing One Wounds Three (gets at the Shin's distaste for the martial arts, and also they seem to have a decidely Confucian, filial piety kind of mentality with their naming conventions, it would make sense to emphasize that you hurt not just the one you kill but their family too) Or Killing Only Wounds Thyself Kneel Only With Tears (I actually really like this one) Or this slight variation of the above Kneel Once Without Trembling Just going to throw out a couple of more of these out there. Keepers of Wordless Truths Kindred of Wind But there's also the fact that this is going to be the epic end of the first five book arc, so something that speaks to that is also quite likely like. Knights of Whispered Tradgedy ( a lot of the crew aren't going to make it to the back five) Kingdoms of Withering Terror (if Odium is ascendant) Kingdoms of Wounded Truths (poor dead eye spren) If all the conflict is resolved it might be Kindly Old Women Talking. If the focus is on the ecological disaster wrought by the misuse of surges and the wanton over harvesting of chasm field's gemhearts than it might be Kleenex Only Wastes Trees And just some silly ones: Kings Often Wipe Thoroughly Knights Out Whacking Things Kicking Out Witty Topaz (maybe Odium finally realizes Hoid is on Roshar) Kinda Oily Wet Toad

@Hentient, String was sooo good! Continuing in a jugular vein, prepare yourself for the gothic horror of... The Picture of Dorian Perrywinkle My footfalls echo down the moonlit corridor, I shudder involuntarily knowing that horrible picture hangs in semi darkness before me. I draw closer, it's terrifying form emerges from the shadows, lit by flickering light from my candle. A juggling clown, painted on the blackest velvet.

I will let my imaginary friend help when doing math that involves i.

The Nightwatcher hands you a Toys-R-Us bag, inside it as an unopened mint condition 80's Optimus Prime Transformer. Your bane is that you talk backwards, not fully in reverse, but rather so that the last word of every sentence comes out as the first, etc. I wish for something that is incredibly fluffy.

Hahaha, yeah it was kind of sad, the ice cream truck was out of Sponge Bob popsicles.

We know that Szeth practiced with more of the honor blades than just Jezrien's, and that for his 4th ideal he picked a Crusade to cleanse the Shin homelands, where the majority of the honorblades still reside. So it's a possibility that in addition to being a skybreaker with access to the surges of gravitation and division, he could pick up an honor blade (or even multiple honorblades). I personally think it would be awesome if he picked up Vedel's honorblade, giving him the surges of friction and progression. With friction and gravitation you would have the fastest flying radiant ever, and with suitable quantities of Stormlight the surge of progression would help offset the downsides of wielding Nightblood. I'm hoping in book 4 we get to see more of the Shin!

We All Scream The van drove slowly down the deserted street, passing the tightly packed houses that looked nearly identical. He scanned the yards with overturned bigwheels, and abandoned slip-n-slides, looking for children. He knew they would come. A child of ten ran to his van, screaming "Yay, ice cream!" There's a happy one!

Granted. Your bane is that you have to hear the Nightwatcher sing "I say tah-mato you say toe-motato, I say pah-tay-toe you say poe-tah-toe, let's call the whole thing off" 50 times. Your eyes are rolling the entire time. I wish for something nostalgic

Granted. You are now cursed to forever carry the fell flute of Lemuria. Black as the darkest night, hewn and shaped from the thigh bone of Moloch, the king of the seven abysses of infernal damnation, this wretched instrument drives any who hear its wailing banshee emmanations insane. Trapped between the world of the living and the dead, you are compelled by forces outside your control to play this wretched flute. You are the symphony of madness that lies in the fog shrouded heath. You are the terror that waits in the dark places of the earth where even spiders fear to go. Your finger work is impeccable, you are told on multiple occasions that never has the symphony of black insanity and unending terror ever sounded so good. I wish I could turn aluminum into gold so I can power my hoverboard.

Granted! The Nightwatcher turned you into a Musician Wren, and now your beautiful soulful chirping can be heard by all who come seeking boons. Visitors to the Valley are often heard talking about the magisterial singing of the NightWatcher's favorite Chicken. I wish I had a hoverboard that really worked. A real, operational version of the flying skateboard from Back to the Future 2.

First off, @Firerust, this is a brilliant character and your stories are amazing. The Lorio one is my favorite, the Curse of Curses is such a good plot device! I finally had enough time to make it through all the stories, and I definitely agree that the world needs more Borio! I loved your Borio Singaldi and The death The death of a prospector A Kind Act Procrastination The date goes west (the circle is complete) This and @AonEne's random magic system thread are the best things going on the Shard right now. It's super fun to see the same character written by different authors, tied together by Borio's affable nature and characteristic affectations. I love @Kidpen's The Legend of the Pink Pants, so funny. I also loved @phoenix2563's Borio and the Perspective of death, it's always great to see Death so thoroughly cheated. @Stormblessed Dolphin's Borio in space was classic, I particularly liked the light saber/light cane duel, and the following bit is so fun and beautifully descriptive. And @Zath's Borio Singaldi and the Fate worse than death was so unbelievably good. The part where Clemendine is making analogies about the monstrosity below Borio's lip is so incredibly good! I also will do a drawing of a bottle of "Uncle Woof's Paw-fect Pomade", because, quite frankly the world will be a better place. @Wyndlerunner's Into the Singaldi-verse was hilarious!! Such good stuff! To hopefully help make this a thing, I humbly offer to you, the amazingly talented progenitors of Borio, the following partially cautionary tale (because it's only half done): Borio Singaldi and Death's Just Desserts (part the first).

First off, I'm a big fan of your theories and posts @Ripheus23, you are one of the few sharders whose posts I'll always check out when I see you have a new one. But this all doesn't hold if thought is merely an effect of non volitional, deterministic causation (this is a position I don't hold by the way). If I understand your argument (correct me if I'm wrong), because words are by their nature, according to your analysis, imperative directives to call up their meaning, and the imperative implies the potential to do or not do, that the simple process of recalling a word's meaning is an act of freewill seems like the wrong basis to argue freewill from. There is rarely conscious thought involved in recalling the meaning of a specific word, and to say that I choose not to know what the word apple means in the statement "Share some of your apple pie", while perhaps serving the function of not having to share would otherwise seem nonsensical. I think where the deterministic chain of causation breaks down is the special case where thought is both subject and object. You can think about thought, and thoughts can affect thoughts. It's possible to have n level recursion of thought where thought is the sole object of thought. It could start from a specific thought (a response to an external stimuli) and then the thought can focus on the qualities of that previous thought, and subsequent n-levels of recursive thought can contemplate the n-1 levels of thought. As an intuitive argument for freewill, I offer up the following thought experiment. Read the following paragraph and then close your eyes and think about the thoughts you are having. Analysis is spoilered below the paragraph. You are in a room with white walls, it appears that you are on the inside of a cube. From the ceiling a single incandescent bulb depends casting a sphere of light. You stare at a corner of the room and see the soft gradations of gray grow darker across the three planes of the walls and the floor until they meet at the darkest point at their shared vertice. You stare at this single point until you can notice the tiniest perturbations of the darkness at this point caused by the variations in the light and the warping of your vision from the disturbances of the vitreous humors in your eyes caused by the expansion and contraction of your lungs. This point of highest contrast swims before your eyes and suddenly all else is lost, you see only this single darkened point. Now think of the first childhood memory that comes to mind, while you simultaneously think about what you want to do with your life. Hold both of these thoughts in your mind while you put your fingers in your ears and listen to the sound of your blood pumping through your body. Breathe deeply, does this effect your memory or your future desires?

Lovecraft's Breakfast Part the Second With a morbid curiosity, and against his better judgement, he once more gazed upon the infernal pan. Through the putrid, charnel haze he could just make out the terrible remains of charred porcine flesh. What demoniac presence had driven him to leave his bacon unattened?

Lovecraft's Breakfast In horror he looked into the darkened depths of that terrible steel box at the blackened organic matter still faintly glowing, its smoking remains releasing a greasy, noxious black cloud. Like one lost, his soul rended in despair, he cried out, "No! Dear God no! Not my toast!"

Karma For forty years he'd played the same numbers, and today he'd won. While crossing the street to mail his winning ticket, a piano that had slipped from an airplane's cargo hold ended the only string of luck he'd ever had with the dissonant clangor of a Philip Glass symphony.