Hoiditthroughthegrapevine

This was so good Channelknight and for a couple of days this image has been kicking around in my brain, a propaganda poster for the ScrubLords: Also you and @SirWolfe should collect your magic systems essays into "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Omniverse", they are so good! As a plot detail you could conduct your travels on a stolen Scrublord spacecraft, that's like Dr. Who's tartus:

My daughter found a really pretty mushroom with a translucent upturned cap and gills that were edged with black, giving it the appearance of a mop of hair, so I did the logical thing and drew John Lennon from the early days of The Beattles on one of fingers and plopped the mushroom hair on. *EDIT* Here's another one in a similar vein. My same daughter has been removing the reflective coating from cds and then burning them with matches to deform and shape them. Some of them formed really cool bubbles that formed when the plastic thinned and the heat from the match made the air underneath rise up. The coolest one she made is spoilered below. And here is her googley eyed thumb looking like an alien in a flying saucer. Maybe I'll update this later with more finger art.

Another great entry SirWolfe! Such a good detail, hilarious!

Granted. You find yourself transported 60 years into the future at the precise moment when you would have died and you live the span of your life in retrograde time, starting from a decrepit senility and finally ending as a baby. You obviously can use your present knowledge of past events to make a fortune, but you have to master the skills of moving backwards, talking in reverse, and most annoyingly of all planning out what you should have done before you do it. But you're so fabulously wealthy that when you slip up and don't do things in reverse people just chuckle at your eccentricities. *Edit* Whoops, granted the wrong boon. @Soulbinder Granted. You can write keteks now, but your arms are now where your legs used to be and your legs are where your arms used to be. Your keteks are lovely though, and you can now draw with your feet, so that's cool too. I wish I could take pictures of ghosts.

Turns out I have a little bit of time this morning, thanks for your replies, I feel now like I understand more of the nuances of your position, and I can see why you would ascribe to determinism. You really made some excellent points, and this has been a fun discussion. Very interesting, so if I take your point, the illusion of freewill performs a corrective function and is a feature of the deterministic system. Don't know if this analogy is appropriate, so correct me if I'm wrong, but it would basically be like the self-examing subroutine in a neural network that assigns weighted points to other subroutines to prioritize some actions that better achieve their goal (in this case better at doing "good" actions) and deprioritize the actions that are failing to achieve their goal (still better at doing "good" actions). That's super interesting and possibly the basis for AI morality. I like it! Fair enough, it seems that most of the History of the discussion of Metaphysics is really just a debate about the meaning of the word being, and confusion over the subject object relationship. If I want to untangle the written equivalent of a Blacksmith puzzle, I'll try to follow Kant's arguments in the Prolegomena for a page or two. Ah, I finally see what you mean with this one, I think that a lot of the problem stemmed from the fact that I was using predeterminisn in the Omniscient Omnipresent powers of God way, when you really don't ascribe the same powers to the great casual chain of deterministic being. I also was still arguing from the standpoint of "what's the utility" of this knowledge, when I think your stance is akin to "this is just how the universe works". I think this was my biggest misunderstanding/misrepresentation of your position. Rad brother, when that purple light comes shining I can design the t-shirts. I'm picturing the World on the back of the purple turtle, who is surrounded by glory lines like the golden starburst seen behind Christ's head in old paintings, with the turtle balanced on a 20 sided die. I know that's an oversimplification, but that would be an awesome shirt. Another good sci-fi story Idea, about the being outside the deterministic Universe that is the source of emmanations of moral imperatives that permeate the closed deterministic universe. Maybe the particles that distribute this force for good could be called goodons, and their anti-particle could be called badons. Don't worry about it, you sound the opposite of preachy. After I reread my original posts I saw that their tone could be construed as flippant and belittling, so I removed the comedic asides. Also when formulating a precise argument it's natural to adopt a more formal tone because nuance exists in the technical details. This debate has been nothing but fun! It seems like this would be similar to the illusion of freewill, if the illusion of altruism is a benefit to society, in that it encourages actions that are beneficial, then it's a force for good. I think where this can go off of the rails is when people who labor under the delusion that they are altruistic try to make other people feel bad because of their lack of this virtue, and the twin vices of Vanity projected to belittle and Sanctimonious rear their horrible heads. It seems that a deterministic system should be agnostic to the motivations involved in the actions themselves, if someone does good for bad reasons the effect is still good, and likewise is someone does bad actions for good reasons the effect is still bad. You can remove the moral dimension by substituting beneficial for good and detrimental for bad, but again I am probably missing a subtle point here. It's been a fun time, you represent your position incredibly well and I think I have a much better grasp on what you mean by determinism. And just to quote Martin Short playing the McCarthy aid Nathan Thurm on SNL "I’m not being defensive! You’re the one who’s being defensive! Why is it always the other person who’s being defensive? Have you ever asked yourself that? Why don’t you ask yourself that?" I still think that if you think about thought, and particularly it's special property to be its own object of thought, determinism might not exist in this special recursive loop. But then again from where does this thought about thought arise? Interesting to think about for sure.

First off I have to say I have the utmost respect for all the people participating in this discussion, I realize looking at my first post I came out swinging a bit too hard, and some of the positions I stated were offensive, and it was never my intent to offend so sorry about that. I really like this discussion and appreciate the opportunity to bounce ideas off of the incredibly nice people here who happen to be some of smartest people I've had the pleasure of interacting with. I don't think that people who hold to a deterministic view of agency do so for necessarily self serving ends. I realize that some people feel that the explanation supplied by determinism is the best theoretical model for explaining causation and agency, and particularly the actions of organisms capable of sense perception and delayed reactions based on the processing of those stimuli. As a world view, especially the extreme predestined variety where actions are solely the end product of purely mechanical processes and random chance, I do believe it lends itself to those bad actors that wish to distance themselves from the effects of their actions, and it's in this regard that I dislike the application of this philosophy. Like you said on one of the first posts of this thread no one here is likely to have their opinion changed about where they come down on the freewill debate, and really I'm not trying to change anyone's mind. I just have my opinions and I like to see other people's opinions and talk about this stuff. I appreciate you taking the time to address the points I brought up, it's not my intent to misrepresent your position and I appreciate your clarifications/objections. That's as it should be, my point though was that irrespective of whether one has true freewill or only labors under the delusional that one has freewill there's a qualitative difference in perception between an actor who has a belief in their own agency and one who thinks that their actions are just an expression of the physical laws governing the universe made manifest in the playing out of their predictable biological processes. Your position could very well be the correct one. I just choose to believe that i have the ability to alter my destiny through conscious active choice, because like Dalinar, I choose to believe that if I must fall I will rise each time a better man. That just works for me. Sorry, you are right, that was an oversimplification that I was using for comedic effect. There's an intuitive sense that even small choices like what kind of coffee you order are volitional, but like you said this could merely be an expression of an innate biological tendency. The point I was trying to make (which is an oversimplification for sure) is that if choice really is an illusion and chance is the only thing that governs choice you might as well roll a 20 sided die to make decisions. But like you pointed out, this ignores the biological imperative side of the equation. I'm talking about good and bad in a moral sense, which implies that the actor has the capacity to make a moral judgement and the agency to choose between what the actor believes to be good and bad. It sounds like a tautology, but it really isn't, no one would ascribe the capacity for moral action to the virus in your example, so applying the moral judgement of "bad" to its effects would be misguided. It is only bad in the sense that it is detrimental, that's not the same thing as saying the virus knew that it's rapid proliferation in someone's lungs would harm them and did it anyway, because it chose to be bad. The point of holding people accountable for their actions is to alter their future actions. I agree with this, but it seems like this is introducing a new operational parameter. I see the evolutionary argument that societies are like composite beings with the innate tendency to develop systems and operational parameters that encourage the interactions that maximize benefits for the whole of that society. But this is granting this composite entity the agency that is denied its individual members, and becomes just one more of the deterministic cages within which freewill is bound. But the story of History is also the story of singular individuals, like Hamrabi, Plato, Lycurgus, Confucius, Lao Tzu, Numa Pamplona, Kant, cromwell, Rousseau, Locke, Liebniz, John Maynard Keynes, Napoleon and many others that had an outsized effect on shaping the dimensions of what society is. Again, this last point is just a critique of the extreme predestined variety of determinism, but I find it hard to believe that nanoseconds after the Big Bang the fact that Sappho, Caesar, Shakespeare, Franz Kafka, and Edna St. Vincent Millay would all live the lives they did was a foregone conclusion, and that given all the initial state variables, the span and actions of their lives could have been predicted with 100 percent certainty. I don't get the first statement, how can predeterminisn not preclude freewill, they seem to be by definition antithetical. I don't like strawman arguments either, most of the time they are built with intentional flaws. I was using that example to show the sheer complexities involved in accounting for all the variables in a given system where a foregone outcome could be expected. To predict an outcome (or at least the probability of an outcome) you have to define a closed system to control for the variables that affect that system. In the extreme predestined variety of determinism it seems to me a hard call to make where you close that system and what time frame of variables you are controlling for. Is the closed system the entire known universe, since the dawn of time? Does it extend into the hypothetical, yet postulated by Quantum Mechanics, N-Dimensional space? How about particles that move faster than the speed of light like neutrinos that hypothetically could be experiencing retrograde time, are they factored into this incredibly complex causal chain too? Totally agree, I was again just speaking to the use of determinism by some to support a foregone conclusion. That type of inverted causation is not inherent in a deterministic worldview it's just a trick that some proponents of deterministic causation use to make their conclusions seem innate and inevitable (like Hegel, who I really like and love reading by the way) Freewill in my opinion functions like Aristotle's Unmoved Mover, it can be a cause in and of itself, unchained to causation, thus breaking the inevitably of deterministic causation. At least that's how I like to think about it. Fair enough, but my one question is where can I sign up to become a member of The Church of Fred? Sorry for the oversimplification, but this does raise an interesting question, from what is the objective morality derived from in a deterministic Universe? Is it the societal level application of utilitarian principles, greatest good for the greatest number, or is it something else? I'm really interested to hear your clarification on this point, because it's one of the main reasons I can't subscribe to the idea of deterministic causation. If you argue from the standpoint that freewill exists then morality is a very important factor. Whether something is moral or not (correct me if I'm wrong) is based on the intent behind the action and the actor's perception of whether that intent is moral or not. In the predestined variety of determinism, an actor aware of their lack of true volition would seem to be acting in a moral vacuum, realizing the intent behind their action is simply an illusion there action just becomes the necessary outcome of their particular collection of biological imperatives combined with the exigencies of their specific existence, and thus they could argue they bear no responsibility for the result of their actions. Well stated, thanks for the clarification. I totally agree about your point that all philosophical system can be turned to rationalize bad actions. My objection to determinism being used as a rationalization for bad actions is the victim mentality that it's often combined with, and the idea that personal actions are beyond one's control. This can lead to a poisonous and self serving cynicism which is really what makes the world a crappy place, not the deterministic worldview itself. That's cool brother! I had a buddy that was developing neural networks to comb through news stories to try and pick winning stocks back in 2001, it didn't work but it was a cool idea. Machine learning is a very good point and makes me wonder if in our lifetimes we'll live to see AIs struggling with the same notions of determinism vs. Freewill. That's a good sci-fi story right there. Thanks again for your well reasoned replies, I think I have a much better understanding of your position now. It was really fun reading through your post, and I hope I've done a better job of not misconstruing or misrepresenting your position. I've got to take a break from the Shard for a bit, alas I'm not laying on a hammock somewhere in the Cyclodes eating grapes with the ability to do nothing but think, the demands of life are starting to pile up. If you reply to this I'll definitely reply back, but probably not for at least a couple of days.

The Bugvaghitta He couldn't fail the queen. Though his quarry was atop what seemed an insurmountable height, Ranma 12 knew that he must secure it, the fate of his people depended on it. He felt a warm, humid gust of air on his back, and just in time dodged out of the way of the 5 razor sharp talons that swept through the air and were as long as his entire body. Quickly climbing the sheer wooden wall, he gazed directly into the amber slitted eye of the fearsome hunter. The terrifying beast was over 100 times taller than him, and with a growing sense of dread Ramna 12 continued the arduous climb. The sleek striped hunter let out a terrifying mewl that made the wall on which he clung tremble and shake. "I can't fail the queen and my people", he thought as his limbs began to ache from his frantic climb. Finally he reached the lip of the plateau that jutted out from the sheer face of the wall, and scrabbling like mad he finally attained the summit. Laid out before him was a dizzying array of treasures, meant to confuse his senses and distract him from his ultimate goal. Steeling himself, his mind and his body as one, with iron determination he passed by the lakes of golden dew, and the mounds of delectable savory food within easy reach. The Queen is counting on me. Finally after much tribulation, he arrived at his goal, a small hill of sparkling white crystals that exuded an intoxicating smell. Gathering as much as he could carry, he began the daunting homeward journey, knowing that what he carried would allow the queen to feed his people. (Alternate narration) The bachelor, living in his apartment with only his tomcat Mr. Waffles as company, was in the kitchen staring at the remnants of yesterday's meals messily spread out on the counter. "Man, I really need to clean this place up, look at that big splotch of honey on the counter, and all those bread crumbs. Did I really spill that much sugar when I was making my coffee today?" The bachelor was startled when he heard Mr. Waffles let out a throaty meow after swiping at the floor. "Too much catnip for you Mr. Waffles" But then he saw it, a tiny ant dressed in a miniature suit of armor, wearing a cape and humming to itself as it frantically climbed up the cabinet and onto the counter. He watched in rapt fascination as the little ant knight hemmed and hawed in front of the puddle of honey. He gasped when the ant knight, pausing dramatically before one of the larger bread crumbs, bent from the abdomen so that its thorax was perpendicular to the counter and made the sign of the cross on its armor covered chest. He watched speechless as the knight ant loaded the pack slung over its shoulder with mound after mound of sugar, and finally carried one massive sugar cube in its two forelimbs. Feeling bad for the little guy, working so hard, he encouraged him to walk onto piece of paper and brought him back to where he knew the ant colony was outside. (Back to original narration) His burden secure, the prize retrieved, Ramna 12 prepared himself for the rigors of the homeward journey. Crossing himself and saying a benediction for his people he walked across the Plateau of Temptation. When suddenly a glorious transcendent white plane appeared from the sky, seeing this as a propitious sign he sallied forth. Up through the air he was borne, with gritted mandibles he clung to that transcendent white plane as he sailed through the dusty air of the treasure cave. Finally he emerged once more into the golden glow of morning, and he found himself transported with speed back to the entrance of his underground kingdom. Thanking his God for his incredible good fortune he walked with his heavy burden to the palace wherein waited his queen. Prostrate before her beauty he offered up the sweet smelling crystals, knowing that the young would soon feast on royal jelly. *Edit* Oh and by the way your bane is that now your skin is paisley, could have been worse. I wish I could shoot something useful out of my hands, like easy cheese or diet pepsi.

Hahhaha, yeah she was another one that saw the inherent weakness of self nullifying collectivism. I loved the Fountainhead, I'll definitely check out Anthem, it sounds great!

What is the utility of the thought that you are a ruddeless ship adrift in a sea of contingency? How does the belief that you are merely a fleshy machine at the mercy of forces beyond your control affect how you percieve the world, the meaning of your actions and the purpose of your life? I've heard lots of people put forward this free will is an illusion argument, but if you followed them into Starbucks they don't glumly roll a 20 sided dice to see what type of coffee to get, they know exactly what they want to order. Good and Bad can't truly exist unless there is a choice. Talking about actions in the context of predetermined actions is really only describing the relative benefits or detriments of actions in regards to the particular actors. What's the point of holding people accountable for actions beyond their control? It's a little like yelling at someone that's in a coma because they wet their bed. If you're ultimately not responsible for actions can they even be called your actions? Furthermore, the predetermined part of that implies a god like level of causation. I'll give another example of this extreme causation implied in the predetermined view of agency. Because a nudibranch in Borneo passed gas at the exact time that a neutrino passed through the earth at that specific location, the herring that passed through that cloud was subtly altered in a way that allowed it to concentrate slightly more Mercury in its bloodstream. The tuna that then ate that herring ended up in my can of starkist tunafish, and the extra molecules of mercury in my brain made me predisposed to enjoy the music of the Bee Gees. So obviously ever since my great great great great great great great great great grandfather got off a boat from London in New Amsterdam, after forgetting to wear his pilgrim hat on the trans-atlantic journey (thereby allowing the sun to beat down on his noodle and cause his brain and that of his progeny to be more predisposed to the adverse effects of Mercury concentration) I was destined to be a fan of the Bee Gees. Do I think this to absolve myself of the responsibility of loving Robin Gibb's falsetto voice? Or do I think this and trudge on, confident that nothing I can ever do or say will be anything different than the 13.8 billion years of inexorable gyrations and permutations of Cosmic Necessity have dictated that I must be. Or do I instead choose to believe that I have chosen to like the Bee Gees. The example could be factual, but like I said earlier the whole deterministic argument seems like inverted causation, working backwards from the conclusion you a have to erect a complex system of causation that is really no different than the idea of a Watchmaker God, with the only difference being that you have substituted God's role with the new actor Cosmic Necessity or Chance. The ability to think about your actions breaks the deterministic cycle. I know the counter argument that all your thoughts are merely the byproducts of a series of accidents that are your particular circumstances, but thought can be a purely internal self-reflective, self-altering process. People like Christopher Hitchens, Steven Pinker and Richard Dawkins arrive at this "robotic human" idea from a desire to remove a step from the casual chain in creation. It's a shortening of the Cosmological argument, they reason that it's simpler instead of saying "God always existed and God created the universe" to say rather that "the universe always existed", this is the foregone conclusion that their predetermination argument is aiming at proving, but this view doesn't by necessity give you a better chance at determining future actions. It's really just a means of removing God from the equation. Everyone is free to believe what they will. I was personally agnostic from my teen years until I was 30. I even distributed handmade flyers at Bumbershoot in 2000 purportedly from The Church of We Know Not the Way called "Questions on Faith", which had 10 arguments for the existence of God that included counter arguments with the directive to talk to your pastor about questions you may have about your faith. I know that the thing that is dispensed with when you shorten the causal chain is an external morality, a sense of good and bad that exists externally from any relative moral framework. And one byproduct of this lack of Absolutes is that people can more easily rationalize bad actions, because they aren't free to choose anything and are merely subject to the accidental whims of an indifferent universe. One final point, I think it is amazing that thoughtful and intelligent people can base an argument on the deterministic workings of the human brain and make the analogy that it's function is like that of a computer. The exact workings of the brain are still largely a mystery and no computer has ever been programmed with a subconscious. Also when a computer program retrieves data from memory it doesn't alter it unless it is directed to. The simple act of remembering alters that memory based on what you are currently thinking about. Thought alters thought. Thought is the engine of freewill, and if you don't honestly believe that then why are you reading this?

Granted. The Nightwatcher grafted a Baobab tree to the top of your head. Everyone always tells you what an interesting tree that is, and your carbon footprint is negative. So uh, you got that going for you. I wish for something unique.

Granted. Your sibilant speech is now a balm for world weary souls. Flowers bloom when they but hear the shortest of your soliloqies. Throngs of admirers hang with baited breath to sip upon the sweet nectar of your honeyed words as they spill from your lips. About those throngs, they are really demanding, following you around always shouting "Speech! Speech". At first you were flattered and you dazzled them all with your sublime perspicacity. But now you've realized that they don't even care what you say, they still weep and prostrate themselves before you when you angrily shout that they are all a bunch of boot licking vermin. So yeah, your bane is annoying groupies. I wish one of my buddies would get a motorboat.

I've said this before, but I still think this might be true. The 4th ideal probably is something utilitarian in nature, but I hope Kaladin doesn't swear it. The fact that he can't accept losing someone and that he internalizes that pain is one of the things that makes him Kaladin. He's not going to swear an ideal he doesn't believe in just to get plate, and I for one am hoping he refuses the 4th ideal, just like he twice refused shards. The power of Kaladin's principles are stronger than the shardplate he could have already had by trading them in. We've got lots of Windrunners who will be capable of swearing the 4th ideal, I say Kaladin is stronger without it, and I suspect with the hinted parallel of him freezing during spear practice when he first enlisted that he might opt for a path where he protects all lives, foreswearing killing as much as he can.

This is one of those debates that introduces a lot of unnecessary noise, and at it's heart the pro-deterministic argument is just an attempt to dogde moral responsibility. You, right now, reading this are simultaneously thinking about this. Thought is one of those magical processes that is recursive in nature. The object can be the same as the subject, you and every organism with a well developed frontal cortex can think about what you are thinking about. Thought itself is an expenditure of energy to increase order. By its nature it is the polar opposite of the processes described by the deterministic camp, which relegate all actions to the exigencies of necessity. If you put forth the argument of the deterministic camp in its extreme form, the inherent ludricousness of an assumed extreme causation becomes apparent. Here's just one example, I've got lots more. From the moment Hannibal crossed the Alps, it was a given that when I had revolved around the sun for 22 years I would buy a red 2 door Toyota tercel. This is like Hegel's dialectic of History, saying that we are mere flotsam on the inevitable tide of the sum total of the infinite complexities of life. His argument had at its heart a need to show that his philosophical system was inevitable, but like most determinists he's arguing backwards from a foregone (and self serving) conclusion. The argument comes down to a selfish desire to distance oneself from the responsibility of amoral actions. It's the same moral skid that spirals into defeatistism, nihilism and a general I'm going to get mine first mentatility that makes the world a crappy place. Ignoring the events that led up to this moment, imagine if you will that you see an elderly woman drop her wallet. There are multiple branching paths of possible futures that hinge upon what you ultimately decide to do. To say simply that you are at the mercy of deterministic forces beyond your control while you pocket an old lady's social security money doesn't really mean that you have no personal responsibility for the ethical implications of your actions, that's just a cowardly self-serving rationalization. It likewise cheapens the good deed of returning her wallet if some scoffing skeptic says that it's merely the end result of predetermined, inexorable processes that caused you to perform that action. Thought effects thought, for good and for bad. People have true choices, for good and for bad. The thought that your actions are outside of your control and are merely the expression of some deterministic necessity goes a long ways towards explaining why the bad sleep well.

The ketek is mirrored around 1 word, in your Ketek it would be glory, and it should have 5 distinct statements or parts. It could be rewritten something like this: Sweet birds song Greeting the dawn The sun rises in fiery glory (New) fiery in rising, sunning the dawn The greeting, singing birds, sweet Your original one is far prettier, but the articles should be in there and only the hinge word appears just once.

Cool, I'll check it out. I've got a buddy that loves Dan Brown. "We" by Yevgeny Zamyatan is really good, it's a pretty bleak story about a futuristic society where egalitarianism is strictly enforced, everyone lives in glass houses, no one has names, etc. It's a really good examination of the idea that when individual freedoms are surrendered for the collective good the worst kind of society is the result. It was written in th 1920's by a very talented Russian author that saw totalitarianism from the inside. Ubik by Philip K. Duck is one of the best sci-fi stories I've ever read. It's about a futuristic society where firms employ telepaths known as precogs to gather industrial secrets, and the firm where the protagonists are from is the premiere counter pre-cog firm that companies hire to protect their secrets when they sense a pre-cog attack is imminent. It's a very convoluted story, and in typical PKD fashion it deals with the line between reality and psychosis induced visions of false reality with the line ending up very blurry indeed. It's really good!

Under the Full Moon The pain. The excruciating pain was unbearable. Each time the transformation would come upon him, his world collapsed to a single white flash of agony. Every night his life would end when the Dreamer awoke. Trapped in another's dream, his brief span always ended with pain.

Malazan, it has the largest and most realized fantasy world that's ever been. There are over 20 books, written by 2 authors and they are amazing. Malazan Book of the Fallen by Steven Erickson is a 10 part epic with each book having endings that rival the Sanderson avalanches. They are incredibly good but definitely more adult. They have the additional benefit that most of the series are complete. Zelazny's Chronicles of Amber are great, or if you are looking for a standalone his book Jack of Shadows is great, but I think his novel Lord of Light is one of the best fantasy novels ever written. One other honorable mention is Bram Stoker's Gothic horror/ fantasy about an Egyptian curse, The Jewel of the Seven Stars, which is a fantastic read and you can read the ebook for free. I would like a good mystery series, like Sherlock Holmes, Raymond Chandler, and Nero Wolfe, good action, good mysteries and possibly solvable while you're reading them.

During the expedition under the aegis of high prince Hanavanar to the Horneater Peaks to study the geanological origin of Veden red hair, a parshman servant fell into Cultivation's perpendicularity. Having bathed in Cultivation's pure investiture, Svjeck the Parshman had his spiritual Connection restored, and thus started a series of comic misadventures as the good natured, seemingly dense but really quite clever Svjeck made his way through Shadesmar (the stories of his adventures in shadesmar have been collected in the very funny volume "The Good Parshman Svjeck"). Svjeck's adventures culminated in the episode where he tricked the lighthouse keeper Riino into trading his fortune ball for a small piece of kippered purelake fish, the kind that reduces gas and soothes indigestion. He also managed to sneak off with a travel brochure on the Fabled City of Elantris, after re-trading Riino's fortune ball back to him for passage to Sel's Cognitive Realm. The Dor was easy to deal with, he had heard it talked up quite a bit but thought it was like the Weeping, he'd gone out in full highstorms to take naps back in Vedenar. Passing through the Shardpool in Elantris with his pack full of items he had traded, tricked, gambled and cajoled out of the denizens of Shadesmar, he had enough resources to barter his way into opening a pub in Elantris. Working with Gallodon, Svjeck quickly setup a series of Aons capable of replicating all of Roshar's varieties of alcohol and he developed a Selish version of Chouta. The money rolled in as the taps ran with Lavis beer, Rosharan wine, and for the truly brave Horneater white. Once his business was established, Svjeck setup a CR convoy system, bringing Parshmen and distillation supplies from Jah Keved. The honorspren that told Kaladin that Odium's forces and the fuzed were gathering at the Horneater Peak's perpendicularity was mistaken, that was really just Svjeck's convoy of distillation supplies and Parshmen emigrants to Elantris. Mraize, Hoid's flute and an unsealed metalmind.

Granted. When you awaken from your 2 year coma Nintendo Switches are in plentiful supply, but the new Nintendo system which is 500 times cooler is all sold out. The Nightwatcher felt kinda bad for you so she gave you one of those punchy balloons thats attached to a rubber band. I wish I could do balloon animal magic, like if I made a balloon dog, the ballon dog would come to life and could walk and bark.

Granted. Unfortunately the first time you use the teleporter you died, and an entity that believes it is you emerged from the other side, fully believing that the teleportation was successful. The process of atom level dissasembley and analysis at the source location and remote reconstruction of the same pattern of atoms and molecules just creates a clone with the same memories, it is in fact not you. Bad break on that one, but there are quite a few copies of yourself in heaven so there's that silver lining. I apologize for any typos, it's difficult typing this by touch, as I can no longer see through the glass of my phone screen. I wish I could see the earth from the surface of the moon.

Granted. No one has ever had a problem reading the word Utah, so all of Brandon's personal books are now in Utah. The Nightwatcher didn't really have to do anything on this one so she gave you a temporary tattoo of Pattern, which only gave you a small mildly irritating rash. I wish I had pony that could talk, and as long as I'm wishing I wish my pony had an Irish brogue.

Granted. You got a puppy! Oh yeah and now you can only talk in rhyming couplets. I wish that I could acquire, a fancy magical lyre

I'm so sorry, I thought you were doing a reread, I feel like a total jerk. I'll spoiler everything from here on out. Sorry again about that! *Edit* I'm going to go back through all of my posts and add spoilers, contrition without action is useless. Sorry again!

I totally agree with this, I loved the atmosphere of this book, and Esselmont's jungle descriptions are some of his best work. The torpid, unnerving drift up the river reminded me of heart of darkness and consequently one of my favorite movies of all times, Herzog's Aguire Wrath of God. The rest of this is spoilered, has spoilers for Blood and Bone and FoD and FoL (sorry Briar King!) So awhile back I finished Forge of Darkness and Fall of Light, and have been waiting until I had enough time to write up a decent post, and I'm really looking forward to hear what you all thought of the Kharkanus books. Spoilers for FoD and FoL What did you all think of the Kharkanus books? What were some of your favorite parts? Or what really bothered you about them?