Hoiditthroughthegrapevine

Great idea! Hey @Ghanderflaffle, I haven't started my roast yet, so it would work to pair @BreezeCauthon and @Kingsdaughter613 for the next round and I could go up against one of the other 2 remaining Rosharans. Let me know if this works, I too have Felt the pressures of an unachievable deadline, and have Wit-nessed the tradegy of trying to Nikli and dime a roast by giving in to the pressure to Adolin that was sloppy and rushed. Far better to Marsh-al another roaster than to Kel the competition and force a Wayne by default. I think you will find that this solution has an sword-nimi of the problems that would have otherwise forced BreezeCauthon to concede.

This is pure gold! Leave it to AI to think outside the box, here's a candidate for Odium's champion that I've never seen before, possible spoiler for Book 5: Bad news for Kal. Hmm, not very much pizza in that one... This one clears up one of the great mysteries of Life as we know it. So, in the spirit of investigative journalism, I felt it was my duty to press the man upstairs about his intriguing ice cream solution, and boy am I glad that I did!

As long as I get the rights to SCP the Musical I'm totally fine with that. Granted, you are a full feruchemist living on earth in America. You can go to sleep anytime you want, you can lose weight without dieting, and you even learn the trick to store your mental acuity while you sleep so you have near infinite mental quickness to tap (not to mention the interesting dreams of a bovine). Life's pretty good. Your bane is that whenever someone uses the indefinite article you fart loudly and uncontrollably. But tapping your f-steel you can quickly escape the scene of the olfactory crime, so if you play your cards right no one will ever no that it was you. I wish everyone could listen to the greatest American band of all times, Okkervil River, oh wait you can thanks to the magic of the internet... This is the song For Real from the concept album Black Sheep Boy (the 3rd best album of all times).

Never had kreplach but I love matzah ball soup. TPBM wishes they had a potato cheese knitsch with some good deli mustard right now.

Hmmm, that's a hard one. I would be either an Awakener of the 6th heightening (3,500 breaths with instinctive awakening, if breaths could be sourced ethically say by getting them from the breath bank where people on hospice have sold them willingly) or a Mistborn bloodmaker. The upside of being an Awakener with instinctive awakening is that all of the mundane tasks of life could handled by a legion of autonomous agents and it would just be fun to awaken stuff. How awesome would it be to have star wars action figures clean your bathroom for you (Dirt Wars: Episode IV, Some New Soap)? Or awaken stuffed animals to play with your dogs. Or Awaken the black side pieces of your Chess set to play a game of Awakened chess. Or awaken gingerbread man shaped cut out Jello jigglers to dance to music. Or how about cooking? You could awaken spoons to stir, burgers to flip themselves and jump off the BBQ onto a plate when they are done, etc. Fun times. But it would be pretty awesome to be a Mistborn able to compound gold. You don't have to be a super athlete to enjoy mistborn flight if you can basically heal from any injury. And you can sleep as much as you want by just throwing up a quick chromium speed bubble. Can't wait till Christmas, use a cadmium bubble. It's a tough call, but I think I would go with the 6th Heightening Awakener.

Fair point, that scene is one of the high points in SLA and it really is a great Adolin story arc (though Kaladin steals the show with his "Honor is dead, but I'll see what I can do" line). I don't mind action Adolin, when he's doing something action oriented. It's the attempts to develop his non-existent personality that I don't really like. Personality: He's a nice guy. Flaws: A skosh too much harmless vanity, an obsession with dueling, the slight propensity to stab high prince's in the eye, and the somewhat endearing penchant for toussling his hair. Really, it's the small little affectations that he's given in place of a personality that bother me and I really dislike the whole girth strap investigation plot line in Wok. But if you love Adolin as a character, keep on loving him, I will attempt to suppress my groans, but I can make no such promises about my involuntary shudders.

Nope, pretty reasonable right now. But after OB came out, I was spending way too much time on the Shard. TPBM has a good technique for getting rid of the hiccups.

I'll go further in my unpopular opinion, the only interesting thing Adolin has done in all of Stormlight Archives is murder Sadeas. Other than that, he is a dull and thoroughly unremarkable character. Whew, feels better just saying that. Not having to pretend that reading about him reading fashion folios, investigating girth straps, and deliberating about what to wear is interesting in the least is a load off. But because he is Adolin the resolution for the only interesting thing he's done is a non-committal shrug. A dull non-resolution is kind of perfect for a dull non-character.

1) I agree with you about RoW, but OB is my favorite SLA book. I think it's a shame that so little actually happened in RoW, not going to get into specifics because of the RoW spoiler policy, but yep, disappointed with RoW for sure. 2) I agree, the Kholin are a tad too radiant as a family. Though this might provide a solution to the dearth of Knights Radiant, Dalinar and Navani can just start adopting people, until all the humans are part of the Kholin family. Might work. 3) I absolutely agree with this, but I think this is first book syndrome. The magic system for Elantris is very cool, and it has it's moments, but it's definitely my least favorite Cosmere book. 4) I think WoBs are great, and I was drawn deeper into the Fandom by how approachable Brandon was. His fan interaction is tops, but I think we're entering a new era where WoBs are going to diminish and more Cosmere wide revelations will occur in text in the books. I think this is unfortunate, but I'm about the same age as Brandon and I know from first hand experience that there's a limit to what a body can do once you enter into the "napping years". It's pretty amazing that he did marathon signing sessions that would routinely finish in the wee hours of the morning, and that he can answer pretty esoteric and specific questions off the cuff, but these will most likely be limited to the fans that are more heavily invested in the Fandom from here on out. C'est la vie. 5) While I agree that Malazan Book of the Fallen is my favorite epic fantasy series of all times, I also think this isn't necessarily a zero sum game. Stormlight Archives is one of the best Epic fantasy series too, at the feast of life why deny yourself buttery croissants just because you like crumpets better? Sanderson is like Plutarch or Dickens, he primarily tells stories for moral instruction while Erickson is more like Montaigne, a somewhat cynical observer of the tragic, comic and beautiful dramas that play out both on a miniature and on a grand scale. (Spoilers for Oathbringer and MBotF up through The Bonehunters) 6) I can see why Hoid's not your favorite. I like him as a character for now, but the jury's still out on whether I'll like him 30 years from now... 7) I actually like MB Era 2 better, but I still think Era 1 is pretty darn good, with the exception of The Well of Ascension. WoA is probably my 2nd least favorite Cosmere book. Hahaha, yeah he's got us by the ankles and is shaking all the loose change out, but it's still worth it for now.

Doh! God no! I'm an American, and I find it regrettable that with all the great cheeses our country produces that our national moniker is assigned to the most rubberry and tasteless cheese of them all. I think that Tillamook Medium Cheddar cheese should be given the title "American cheese", and then we Americans can hold our heads up proudly when we ask our local cheesemongers for American Cheese. TPBM is unable to find sharp cheddar Easy Cheese at their local supermarket.

Nope, sorry. TPBM can juggle.

Granted. You are now bonded to an Honorspren who is adorable, vivacious, and so full of life that she can't help but laugh at all of the absurdities of life. Unfortunately she has a laugh just like Gertie from Oklahoma. As even the mundane episodes of your life are punctuated by the laughtrack of her horrible, braying laughter you come to realize that the reason for the Recreance might have been more nuanced than you had previously believed. I wish for a magical comedy/tragedy bolo like this one, that when cinched in a specific way would cause everyone around me to start singing and dancing as if the current situation was part of a musical. Like, for instance, if I were to cinch my magical bolo in the produce section of the grocery store, normal shoppers would begin twirling their carts, juggling lemons, apples and heads of cabbage, and the person riding the ride on shopping cart would spin in circles while maybe balancing a pineapple on their nose, all while singing a thematically linked song.

So they released a 290 mb full color composite panoramic view from the Perseverance mastcams on the Mars 2020 NASA site yesterday (but I don't see it there anymore). I downloaded it and made a quick animated zoom and pan gif (spoilered below), pretty sweet. It might have been too high resolution of an image, they have a different mastcam panoramic image up now (resolution of just 3.9 mb and the lighting is not as good) https://mars.nasa.gov/resources/25622/perseverance-navcams-360-degree-panorama/ Even cooler, NASA just released composite video footage of the Entry, Descent and Landing for the Perseverance lander showing footage of the parachute deployment, the heat shield ejection and the sky crane maneuver, ending with the successful touchdown on Mars: https://mars.nasa.gov/multimedia/videos/movies/20210222_Perseverances_Descent_Touchdown_Mars/20210222_Perseverances_Descent_Touchdown_Mars-3840.mp4 Also, NASA has released the first audio recording captured by the Perseverance rover from the surface of Mars: https://mars.nasa.gov/mars2020/multimedia/audio/ And finally, this is the best all purpose link to use to check up on updates from Perseverance (especially the Multimedia portion of the top nav menu button, especially fun to look through are the Raw images): https://mars.nasa.gov/mars2020/

Pip pip! Here's the first picture from the Perseverance lander, (picture of my TV from the live feed) from the Hazard camera. And here's the 2nd Pic, from the rear camera. One thing I learned about from watching the live feed is that NASA has a future program codenamed Dragonfly that will use the analysis of the flight of the Ingenuity Mars helicopter to design an aerial rover to explore Saturn's moon Titan. So cool! Also, another interesting detail from the live feed is that Titan's atmosphere is 4 times denser than the Earth's, and due to it lower gravity (.138 g) a human on Titan's surface could achieve lift by just flapping their arms. Here's the link to NASA's Dragonfly mission, awesome stuff: https://www.nasa.gov/dragonfly

Less than 24 hours to go before the Perseverance Lander touches down on Mars! Just a recap, the Entry, Descent and Landing starts tomorrow at 12:35 PST, and with Martian surface touchdown slated to occur at 12:55 PST. There will be an 11 minute and 20 second communication delay, but we should know if the SUV sized Perseverance lander has safely negotiated the landing by 1:07 pm PST. You can launch live coverage of the landing starting at 11:15 am PST tomorrow on Nasa's YouTube channel and on the live NASA TV feed. If you just want to watch the good parts, start watching around 12:45 pm tomorrow. If the landing is a success, we might shortly thereafter have another milestone, the first deployment of a flying vehicle on a planet other than earth. Go little drone, go!

Hahaha, when you give your kitten Temptations, and as you watch the speed and brutality with which your kitten dispatches them, you'll have to say "Witness!" Gardens of the Moon is great! The unfolding of Shadowthrone and Cotillion's plan is great, and the demented puppet Hairlock is one of the best minor villains of all times. It's an even better book on a reread, all the different events make a lot more sense. Definitely post again when you've finished it, the ending, like all the books in MBoF, is epic, and makes a lot more sense the 2nd time through.

Just to wade in, here's my current list (3 out of the 5 were recommended by @Ammanas, his recommendations are great!) : Malazan Book of the Fallen (and if you want more Malazan, then The Kharkanus trilogy and the Collected Tales of Bauchelain and Korbal broach). Erickson's writing takes a bit to get used to, but he is a keen observer, a deep thinker and a master of amazing endings. Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn (including The Last King of Osten Ard series). Tad Williams is a gifted storyteller, he has created a fully realized world, filled with great and believable characters and the story progresses logically but along completely unexpected paths. Journey to the West. The Chinese classic tale of the monk Tang Sanzang's journey to India to retrieve the Bhuddist sutras with his 4 stalwart companions, one of then being Sun Wukong, the Monkey King. This is one of the greatest stories ever told, but if you don't want the 2,300+ page version, then the Arthur Waley abridged translation is exceptional. The Conan stories by Robert E. Howard. Though his life was tragically cut short, the Conan stories he produced mostly for Weird Tales in the 1930's still stand as some of the finest fantasy ever crafted. His obsession with the idea that civilization is an aberration and is always on the brink of returning to Barbarism is given a powerfully entertaining and compelling symbol in the character of Conan. If you like how Hercules is portrayed in the classic Jason and the argonauts (with Ray Harry Hausen's brilliant stop motion animation), chances are you'll like Howard's Conan. Howard was also a poet, so his prose can be very florid and dramatic, but his descriptions of action sequences are always exciting, and Conan goes through a series of different roles in the books, from thief, to tribal chieftain, to captain of a band of reevers, to king. The Wheel of Time. I started this series in high school, and didn't finish it until nearly 20 years after I started it. Jordan's description of environment and imagination to create these environments is some of the best in fiction, and the intrigues, meetings and machinations of the dark friends and Forsaken are fantastic. Also, it has a great magic system. I'm not going to lie, when Crossroads of Twilight came out I was wondering if maybe I had wasted my time, but I will be a life long Brandon Sanderson fan for how he pulled order out of chaos and finished the WOT in just 3 books. Towers of Midnight and Memory of Light are 2 of my 5 favorite Wot books, and Perrin went from one of my least favorite POV characters to one of my favorites.

I really don't like the Kaladin establishing a mental health system angle of RoW. It all seems a bit too pat, a bit too schlocky. The war of Loss, where the Hierocracy was defeated by Sadees the Sunmaker and the Vorin church was disbanded, and the modern Roshar ardentia was established, happened in 675. I find it hard to believe that in the the 500 years since the formation of the devotaries, that the only proscribed treatment the ardents could come up with for people with suicidal ideations was to lock them up in windowless cells away from other people. We are quite clearly led to believe that Kaladin's sympathetic situation (he experienced the same thing, ergo he's an expert) and his training as a surgeon makes him uniquely qualified to unlock the mystery that depression and the resultant suicidal tendencies of the depressed aren't ameliorated by forced isolation and confinement in darkened cells. The whole plot line felt like a curated, proscribed emotional journey and was the opposite of powerful for me. It felt forced and hokey, that Kaladin was the one that figured this out and was the one making a large institutional change. Not content to be Stormblessed the Hero, and the father of Clinical Psychiatry, I forsee our boy Kal inventing penicillin, figuring out how to do soulcast organ transplants, and solving the ecological disaster that is brewing from the wholesale slaughter of Chasmfiends and the Everstorm blowing the wrong way. Why not.

Just when I think I'm out, Cosmere Character Roasts Battles draws me back in... Just so you have some more flexibility for balancing sides, sign me up as Felt @Ghanderflaffle.

Granted. The Nightwatcher says to you, in a nasaly monotone, "You realize that identity cannot be divided, do you not? You cannot possibly be two people at once, except through a technicality. So be it." You find that you are a now a Siamese twin, joined at the neck. You have one head, one brain (and hence one identity and one personality) but two complete and separate bodies sharing that head, with distinct, intact and functioning alimentary canals. The upside of this is that you can now pull your own finger, and hilarity ensues. Your bane is that one of your bodies is severely allergic to all fabrics other than polyester. Granted!GYouGnowGseeGcapitalGG'sGbetweenGallGwrittenGwords.GItGneverGgetsGold.GUnfortunatelyGyouGhaveGtoGpronounceGtheGG'sGwhenGyouGreadGoutGloud.GHereGisGanGexample: GAnneGshotGaGgun,GandGwithGanGunfortunateGrichochetGsheGwentGoutGwithGaGbang! RenderedGPhoneticallyGitGreads: GAnne-Guh-shot-Ga-Guh-gun,Gand-Gwith-Gan-Gunfortunate-Grichochet-Guh-she-Gwent-Gout-Gwith-Ga-Guh-bang! (HenceforthGspacesGwillGrevertGtoGtheirGnonG"G"Gform) I wish for the power to force any tossed coin to land on the side of my choosing, and for the capacity to use this rather mundane power to take over the world.

Sorry for the double post, but this is some good new info. I was looking up something up about the Bauchelain and Korbal Brooch novellas on the Malazan Wiki, and I saw that the B&K Novella, Upon a Dark of Evil Overlords, that Erickson was writing and releasing on his facebook page, one handwritten page a day, was finally done. Here is an index to the individual pages on his Facebook page (or you can just use the arrow navigation from Erickson's Facebook page): https://malazan.fandom.com/wiki/Upon_a_Dark_of_Evil_Overlords While looking through his Facebook page, I noticed he had some maps that show where the God is Not Willing is going to take place (on Genebackis mostly it seems). This first one is one of his original maps drawn during for his gaming sessions with ICE, showing the part of Genebackis that TGINW takes place in, and may or may not have some spoilery bits: https://www.facebook.com/photo?fbid=1628451033973857&set=a.893848104100824 This is the version of the map that Erickson drew and submitted for inclusion in the God is Not Willing (like his other maps, this will be redrawn by an artist at Tor for the final book): https://www.facebook.com/photo?fbid=1736950586457234&set=a.893848104100824

Yeah, they are probably the most self-contained stories in all of Malazan. You can read them at anytime without fear of spoilers for mainline events, they are kind of sequential, but even in the B&K series they could be read in any order. I have a pretty good tolerance for the strange and dark, but I do think Crack'd Pot Trail went too far, and I think that Erickson with that one was a bit too keen on writing a Twisted Canterbury Tales. But Blood Follows, Lee of Laughter's End, The Healthy Dead and Wurms of Blearmouth are great. It's kind of like if Jeeves was a powerful, amoral Necromancer and Wooster was instead his luckless manservant and they are both travelling with a homicidal, demented maniac who also happens to be a Necromancer, and hilarity ensues. Bauchelain is the master of understated dialog, and a lot of the truly funny bits are the classic British farce style irony of situation. And Erickson really let's himself go and has his most Dickensian named cast in the B&K books. I'm actually doing a Reread of Blood Follows right now, and it's so incredibly good! Not everyone's cup of tea for sure, so if you like it, great, if not there are lots of different cups with lots of different tea out there. Here is how Blood Follows opens:

If you like dark and gritty, and are a fan of black comedy, you should definitely check out the Bauchelain and Korbal Broach novellas (especially the ones in the first collected stories of B&K). Don't know if you remember those two very evil Necromancers and their hapless manservant, but you see them for the first time in Memories of Ice when they travel with Gruntle's caravan. And their meeting in MoI with Quick Ben is one of the my favorite moments in all of Malazan. The guy who started this thread, @Ammanas, recommended Tad Williams' Memory, Sorrow and Thorn series to me, and it's one of my favorite series of all times now. It was written in the late 80's, and is cited by Martin as a major inspiration for Song of Ice and Fire (I actually think it's a bit more than just inspiration, Martin basically combined the magical elements of Memory, Sorrow and Thorn with the political intrigues of the War of Roses, and added in a dash of realistic brutality). The first book in MSaT, The Dragonbone Chair, is one of the tightest plotted books I've ever read. The beginning is a slow ramp into the world of Osten Ard, but it's also laying down thematic strands that are woven through the whole series. And the best part is that there's a follow up series, The Last King of Osten Ard, that is nearly complete, and that is just as good as the original trilogy. The plotting is not as tight as MSaT, but the world building is better and there's a bit more realism to the battles (more gore, yet still tastefully done). Also, the new series takes place roughly the same number of years between the publication of the two series, so you get a follow up series 30 years after the end of To Green Angel Tower. And the 3rd book in the series, The Navigator's Children is slated to come out this year.

Yeah, I've read Malazan Book of the Fallen twice, and it is such a good series! The characters are great, the world is large an interesting and the endings are always great. And there are a lot of threads woven through the whole series that connect in an incredibly compelling fashion when you reread the series. A lot of details tie neatly into plot lines that just seemed baffling or mysterious the first time through. Good stuff for sure! The Novels of the Malazan Empire by Esselmont are pretty good, Night of Knives is kind of hard to get through, but they definitely get better. And Stonewielder is one of my favorite Malazan books. Kyle is one of the main protagonists, introduced in The Return of the Crimson Guard, and this might just be my opinion, but I think he is possibly the dullest character ever. He never really does anything except associate with other characters who are very cool. He's like the guy that the most you can say about him is that if he's around the group is larger by 1 person. The Path to Ascendancy series is fun, it's an interesting view into Dancer and Ammanas' partnership before the founding of the Malazan Empire. I think the Novels of the Malazan Empire are better, but a lot of people really like Esselmont's PtA books. It's not a super popular opinion, but I love the Bauchelain and Korbal Brooch novellas (with the exception of Crack'd Pot Trail, that one was a bit too much for me). Blood follows, where you see Emancipor Reece hired on as Bauchelain's ill fated manservant is great, The Lee's of Laughter is mildly disturbing but overall quite fun, and the Healthy Dead is one of the best bits of satire this side of Jonathan Swift's Indecent proposal. The first two books of the Kharkanus trilogy are great too, but are definitely slower and more in the vein of long form essays than tightly plotted gripping fantasy. They deal with the ancient schism between the Tiste, and the strange powers of the Azathanai. They have a couple of my favorite scenes in Malazan, but overall they are very unlike Erickson's MBotF novels. Thankfully Erickson has started working again on the 3rd book, Walk in Shadows, and hopefully he has an easier go on that one then he did on Fall of Light (which took 4 years to finish). There are a bunch of recommendations on how to read M as lazan out there, but for my money, I'd say the best way to read it is do your reread of MBotF first, it's the primary fount of the History and mythos of the World of Malazan. Then you can pick which fork you want, but the most contemporaneous connections exist between the Novels of The Malazan Empire. Path to Ascendancy is a prequel, and the Kharkanus books tske place 300,000 years before the events of MBotF. However you do it, it's a great ride for sure. Would love to hear your reactions as you read through Malazan, it's a truly great series and it's always fun to talk with intelligent people about good books!