king of nowhere

right, forgot melaan. i'd like to revert my vote, then. not only she can look how she wants, but she actually enjoys the attention, and that makes a difference. it's why jasnah wouldn't rank so high, imho; she always act like she's trying to set herself aloft, and this kills her attractiveness. allrianne is another good contender if she can riot the judges. first, we are not judging their physical appearance, but we are rather judging their ability to tamper with it and with a jury and second, it's not like we are deciding their worth based on it. I know some internet lechers have given the whole issue a bad name, but this is no different than any other contest of skill (and yes, being attractive is a matter of skill - of attitude, behavior - as much as looks, so it's not just a matter of "nature was generous with you")

shai can reshape herself with forging, she wins easily shallan can put up a better look with illusions, but it's not as real.

a classic speech. but perhaps we should apply it to hitler too? I don't think so. i said if i were there i'd have shoot. who would i be to give the judgment? what moral or legal autorithy? None but the simple fact that I'm the only one there with the gun and the capacity to pull the trigger, and so I must choose. pity may spare an innocent. it may even turn her into a precious ally. on the other hand, pity may doom many others who would be killed by her. any decision may be wrong, and even the wise cannot see all ends. and for this reason it is generally best to stay on the side of caution. but we are talking about a woman who unleashed an horror capable of destroying entire planets. she's not even upholding superiority values - those would forbid what she did - she's taking part in a megalomaniac coup. I do believe, when you are in such a situation, you cannot avoid judgment. if you shoot and you are wrong, you are guilty, but if you don't shoot and the bad guy goes on to hurt more people, you are equally guilty. not deciding is a decision itself. especially you can't try to keep your hands clean; i see that as very selfish. Lives are at stake, and what you care for is your own moral high ground? what the hell hero? that's not how you keep a moral high ground. you do it by doing your best with what you have. and granted, most of the times that's not shooting, because you don't know enough. because if you don't shoot someone may die but if you do shoot someone will die for sure, so if you are not certain you are avoiding more death, you should not shoot. this applies to virtually every instance in real life. the only exceptions i can see are judges judging dangerous murderers and presidents deciding whether to try to assassinate terrorists, and both are things that do not happen to normal people. and that's why we're told that we should not take judgment in our own hands, and why it's a good idea in real life. But when you have witnessed beyond doubt that this person has been calling a planet eater? if that doesn't tip the balance, what would? (and may i point out that just after spensa did not shoot, brade blew up a shuttle full of civilians? those are all lives i'd have saved, though of course i could not choose in advance) as for her being brainwashed, it doesn't factor in for several reasons. first of all is that this is an emergency judgment in a combat situation. it is not a trial on brade's persona, how bad she is, whether she deserves redemption. no, when so many lives are at stake, the only thing that matters is, "will killing her save more lives?". I shoot her not for being a darker or lighter shade of grey, but because she was endangering everyone else, everywhere. the second is that there are limits to what we can accept with a crappy background excuse. many nazis were equally brainwashed, but they were still held liable for their crimes and the third is that her society wouldn't even have brainwashed her that way. she grew up in a perfectly pacifist society, where even shouting at someone who bumped your car in the traffic would be heavily frowned upon. You can't tell me this society has pointed her towards summoning a planet-exterminator monstruosity. No, if she was the perfect lotus-eating child, then she would have reported winzik treasonous intentions to some higher authority, as would be her duty. And this is where i don't accept that she's just a product of her upbringing. I would be more forgiving of her if she was raised by a family of genocidal nazis (mind you, I'd still pull the trigger, as discussed above); then at least she would not be doing something that is glaringly against everything she's been taught.

yes, you are remembering well, he had a wall fall on top of him. and robert jordan apparently wanted to keep the suspence, because it will be a while before we see mat again. without spoilers, i could tell you exactly when mat reappears, if you wish

1) is not a spoiler. When mat went into the ter'angreal in the stone of tear and found the snakes answering three questions, he got some prophecies told. one of those was that he had to marry the daughter of the nine moons. Mat has been asking every girl is she is the daughter of the nine moons before courting her. but the title sounds definitely seanchan, so that he's going to accidentally marry a seanchan lady is no spoiler. Furthermore, the moment Tuon appears in the story, she's introduced shortly enough as the daugfghter of the nine moons, so again, wasn't a spoiler. 2) this is actually a spoiler. 3) not exactly clear like 1), but I've been seeing the story going there ever since we discovered that aiel practice poligamy. 4) not exactly preordained, but it's one of the major things that are wrong with the world, so it could be surmised that something would have to be done about the taint sooner or later. plus, because of the whole concept of cyclic time, we can safely say that if saidin was clean in the past, it must be cleaned in the future too. though it may have happened in the 5th age, but really, would you really think the story would end with saidin still tainted? 5) i was actually expecting moiraine to be dead for real. barring that, there had been many hints that the two like each other. if you were expecting moiraine to be alive, then it's no spoiler that they end up together. so, all in all, you haven't been spoilered all that much. most things could be surmised if one has a good eye for details

it's also shorter and simpler. when you have to make a quick catch phrase, words are at a premium, and something less convolute sticks better

I'm comparing starshight with warbreaker. in warbreaker, brandon tried hard to represent everyone's viewpoint about the conflict. he had jewels give a irade about the hallandren religion because someone had to defend it. he said in the annotation that he considers important to give space to all opinions in his books, even if they are fictional opinions on fictional topics. then we have starshight, where absolutely nobody defends the supremacy. which - minus the random executions of dissidents - is probably worth defending more than most people realize. having recently read the old man war saga from john scalzi, it influenced how i perceive a galactic community. in that saga, every race is enemy with everyone else. the humans have contacted 600 other races, and for 550 of those the policy is "fire on sight". the other races are no better. so I'm thinking, what if breeding people to be excessively mild and polite - quaranteening everyone else - is actually the only way to avoid that scenario? what if the supremacy is the only thing standing between a peaceful universe and total war? I didn't expect the point to be explored, but I would expect that someone would at least raise it.

it's not stated, but it was said that when she impersonated a farmer and sabotaged the dam, being later executed, "the tomb was desecrated, the body disappeared". she let herself be buried, and she dug out. as a kandra, she can probably build up extra hemoglobin to store extra oxygen and survive being buried, and she can dig efficiently by reworking her body. she probably did the same as lassie too

well, i did specify i was misrepresenting it by taking that sentence literally. because it's a sentence that many people are fond of using, but its literal meaning is not the one most people use. i guess i have a pet peeve against it because, in its literal form (the one that leads to insanity), it has inspired a few laws that make my life difficult. so, whenever the topic comes up, i always remind people "be careful, that sentence doesn't mean what you think, and it must be taken with a grain of salt" well, for a grey character, different people would put them in different categories. i remember there was a thread once "is kelsier evil?", with people arguing on both sides. but yes, i agree that everyone can be categorized on one side or the other. it's just that evil does not immediately equate to hitler, and good does not mean saint, and a lot of people sit close enough to the border that it doesn't really make much of a difference where you decide to draw the line.

i didn't want to actually follow up that discussion, but now i have to. because if your idea of grey is "stalin was aiming for utopia", well, of course that's stupid (and by the way, he probably wasn't, he just wanted power). you want an example of someone fairly gray, take kelsier before he died. he killed people he didn't have to and his motives weren't the most sterling. then again, his motives weren't also really bad, he mostly fought bad people, and he made a better world. take vin at the beginning. she was as decent as she could while being a thief, but still she had no higher goal than "do what it takes to survive". later she becomes fully good, but she certainly wasn't back then. i wouldn't call her evil either though, especially considering the kind of world she has to survive in take egwene from the wheel of time. an arrogant brat and a bully who always wanted to be in power. an hypocrite who kept telling rand how is head had swelled big for not obeying moiraine all the time, right when she was disdaining aes sedai with 10 times her age and experience. a hero who willingly (she could have quit/run away many times) went to fight an evil much powerful than herself, helped those she could whenever she could, and committed self-sacrificed in the last battle. but mostly, shades of grey means that even though you can tag most people as good or evil, most good people aren't perfectly good and most evil people aren't perfectly evil. breeze is a good person, but he's still a lazy edonist who expect others to cater to him. wayne is a good person, but besides being a kleptomaniac, he's still... wayne. he once broke into a home because he needed a lodging. while he did no damage and left some food, i doubt you'd be happy to discover that someone has been using your home while you were away. another time he tricked a boatman into bringing him where he wanted without charge, and other minor acts that are very annoying on the receiving end. and on the other side you have rashek. he's certainly evil, but he was trying to fight ruin. when he ascended, he became cosmere-aware. he could have escaped scadrial, and he would have kept his power intact. instead he kept struggling with a voice in his head slowly eroding his sanity. or taravangian, who - despite your lamentations that ends don't justify the means - is certainly not stalin. and speaking of end not justifying the means, this sentence, taken at the extreme it literally means, is absurd. going by that concept, waging war on the nazis was wrong, because it hurt people. much better to let them take over the world. going by that concept, any kind of criminal punishment is wrong. a verdict is never 100% certain, and you are guaranteed that any justice system, even the most fair and sensible, will end up condemning an innocent every once in a while. so, if the end does not justify the mean, then you should never condemn anyone, ever. of course this would result in social collapse, but condemning innocents is not justified by keeping order. you should also not kill animals, they certainly did nothing wrong to deserve it. this includes swatting mosquitoes. or using any kind of pest control on crops. we should probably avoid walking around, the goal of going on with our lives does not justify the mean of accidentally swatting dozens of innocent bugs for that matter, how do you decide what is an end and what is an evil mean to reach it? in the aforementioned justice example, is accidentally condemning some innocents an evil mean to the end of keeping social order? or is allowing for social disruption an evil mean to the end of avoiding the slightest bit of culpability? the way you phrase it changes everything. putting taxes that hurt the working people to finance important public projects, inflicting punishments to criminals to keep crime in check, compromising your values in foreign politics to avoid a war - over a disagreement stemming from the other nation having different values than yours, in which they believe no less strongly -, forcing people to work to earn a living because you need someone to carry out some work, those are cases that can be phrased as "means to an end". but i do not think you mean the sentence taken to that extreme. I assume you take a more reasonable interpretation. which means that ultimately you agree with me in having to choose between imperfect alternatives. You simply have a skewed concept of what "shades of grey" entails. As for helping evil, sure, there is evil who attempts to hide in the blurred line. There is much more evil that hides underneath moral absolutism. You mentioned stalin and hitler, but they did not present their crimes as "means to a good end". No, they presented their crimes as justified ways to pursue and punish enemies of the state. they used moral absolutes to claim that those people were "evil", and acted accordingly. same goes for the crusades, the inquisition, or modern day islamic terrorists. in their distorted ideologies they do not claim that the world is grey and they are making sacrifices for a just cause. no, they claim, as you do, that the world is black and white, and since they clearly are white, anything different from them is black and ought to be righteously exterminated. never take moral relativism for defending evil. while it has brought some excess itself, it was born specifically as a reaction to the evils of moral absolutism.

no thanks. i like the plot to make sense and be consistent. hard magic is one of the things i appreciate more about brandon. No, thanks. If i want to get depressed, there's plenty of stuff in real life to do it. I want brandon to keep writing the way he has been writing so far. If I wanted brandon to write differently, i would not be a fan of his, but i would instead look for some other author. brandon generally uses the "shades of grey" kind of morality, and it is the one i favor. black and white feels too much a fake. reality is not black and white. everyone is morally equivalent is often realistic, but then i won't have anyone to root for. no, just because someone is protagonist and has a viewpoint i won't root for him, nor will i accept his self-centric view. and i want to root for someone. see the part about me not wanting to get depressed so, what works best for me is a clearly good side, with some flaws, and a clearly bad side, with some motivations that actually make sense.

i've seen many different opinions expressed in this forum, and they were mixed. to my knowledge, there is no consensus on any SA book being better or worse than the other. as for the other questions, they were answered in depth by other posters

the aliens in sixth of the dusk are not krell. it is assumed that they are future inhabitants from scadrial (the setting of the mistborn books), though that's not confirmed. anyway, they are humans, and skyward universe is not the cosmere. the word "krell" also appear in sixth of the dusk, referring to some undescript animals that apparently form the base of the food chain around the pantheon islands. that's clearly a coincidence, as not only they are in a different universe, they are not even sapient.

there is actually a #7 update, but it's not linked or advertised anywhere

shouldn't we be getting a reddit update? he said in his last post on 31 december Since then, i'm checking daily

"better if the cadet dies inexperienced than letting the cadet get experienced before he dies". winzik would approve. sorry if i don't find that logic particularly compelling. i must also point out that if the purpose is to give them practice on actual fighters, it would be better to have them run live exercices without weapons rather than real battles. that's what any sane army does. and before someone tries to argue "they don't have enough spare fighters for it", yes they do. there are always some in reserve that could be used for training. they could not train every flight at once on real ships, but often enough. and oddly, i think the number of available ships would be likely to increase if they stopped giving so many of them to half-trained rookies

i second not wanting to read moash breathing, but narrative structure dictates that when you set up a villain like that, the villain is there to stay. i'll settle for hoping that the radiants will not get any more super powerful than they already are. i prefer lower-powered heroes, as i feel that too much power detracts from the narrative (either it makes the task too easy, or it makes the hero the only person capable of doing it, which detract from his heroism)

didn't read redwall. but what i thought about the kitsen is that they are much alike spensa: small, downtrodden, with a massive desire to prove that they can kick asses.

ultimately there wasn't anything to hype for, and some sad news. i'm glad that brandon considered timing issues, though. we've been concerned for a while about his capacity to finish the cosmere within his lifetime, and now that he himself acknowledged that, and he's taking precautions to avoid it. also sad about the lines, but unfortunately there's only one brandon and his fandom is ever growing. it was inevitable. i voted to randomize someone to have an old style signing, because i believe it's better to preserve something beautiful for someone else than to lose it entirely

i also noticed that stormlight 4 was at 95% a few hours ago, now it's back at 92%. must have been some kind of rollback

brilliant idea

you need to know those astronomical data, though. you need to measure those data with as much precision as possible.

still, it doesn't matter how good you are with numbers, if you don't have an adequate instrument for measurement. in fact, i doubt anyone would know exactly the difference between teod and arelon; with the technology that seems available at the time, they probably have at least a few kilometers of uncertainty. in our world we had a few hundred kilometers of uncertainty in our knowledge of the planet's diameter (yes, eratostenes got very close to the real value, but he got lucky that many sources of error canceled each other. other scholars devised equally ingenious methods to measure the earth radius, and they came up anywhere between 6000 and 7000 kilometers). there is also the uncertainty in the step. ok, perhaps adien somehow knows exactly the average lenght of his step. still, anyone's step is not that regular. even using that single step that he demonstrated, it would need a precision down to no less than one tenth of a millimeter to give a reasonable accuracy over one million steps. just one millimeter wrong, and you end up one kilometer in the ocean, or away from the docks. that kind of accuracy is above what the leg muscles can achieve, and above what the eye can estimate. so, "he's good with numbers" is really not a good explanation. could be helped by investiture, though.

actually, intentionally summoning a delver is a crime so bizzarre, i doubt anyone had actually made a specific law about it anyway, the problem with the superiority ideals is that they are trying to enforce a utopia that cannot exhist. the problem is that there are always evil people hurting other people. to stop them completely, you can either brainwash the whole population, or have a super-restrictive police state. both have obvious drawbacks. hence what i called the evil of utopia: trying too hard to remove suffering only ends up in one of those scenarios. if you focus too strongly on education to prevent evil people, you overstep into brainwashing. if you focus too much on repression, you get a police state. if you focus too much on guaranteeing freedom, you get a lax state where crime runs amook and is unpunished. the superiority clealrly overstepped into the first scenario.

well, of course. that's pretty much the point. however, by not getting his hands dirty, he can fake a moral high ground and use it for his purposes.