hephaestus

The IEEE is not a government body.

#2 there would suggest that he might be best served finding someone to do the "run the business" part of things. As for #3, I should think TOR would have to be happy enough with the money he's dragging in for them to not want to kill that golden goose by angering the consumers of the product. Which, to be fair, I don't agree with a lot of the criticisms in this thread, it all still seems to hit me like it used to. I'll just say that the crying was ugly at the "Brandon, you absolute bastard" part of YaNP. And the vast majority of his books have at least one scene that hits that hard for me, if not several.

I've been on a Sanderbender this last, erm, month, and had some similar though not identical thoughts on the topic. The main one I was pondering was if a kandra could take a couple of partial skeletons and make something completely new. We already see the mistwraiths making bodies with a larger than normal number of limbs, so if you had a horse skeleton and a human skeleton, could a kandra make a reasonable facsimile of a mythological centaur? I will fully admit that I have absolutely no idea how closely the cervical vertebrae of a horse match up to the sacral vertebrae of a human. If the mismatch is too great, perhaps a koloss skeleton? Those presumably get larger...

Please, Chouta is clearly Fantasy Burritos. Or possibly Fantasy Shawarma.

Yes, I mean something other than that, indeed, something to add to that. The scrollbar at the bottom shows years, but nothing says what "zero" is, at least that I could find. It'd be like talking about Earth history, and referring to dates in CE and BCE, and never defining what switched one to the other. Like, in Rosharan dating, it's what, 1755? But ... 1755 since *what*? The Shattering was -10,000 years, but ten thousand years before *what*? I do grasp from the other response is that the answer is "Brandon hasn't said yet" in which case, OK, I can't reasonably expect the site admins to know things that WoB hasn't revealed yet. Just... I went looking for a timeline to find that datum, and found this beautiful website, and it *still* didn't have the info I wanted. I didn't realize that was because we didn't know yet. Though it seems like a large oversight, but I can see how in Western civilization, it could be considered *so* inherent that people might just never even think to mention it.

Just found the timeline site (yeah, five years late sounds almost exactly correct for me) and generally enthused, but I have to say that not having an event marker -- or a blurb in the pop-up that explains the dating system, or both -- which explains what the zero point for the year number is based on, is a fairly significant oversight, IMO.

Ok, so I just read Dawnshard (because I didn't realize it existed until last week) and my engineer brain has been percolating ideas for how to improve Rysn's mobility, and make her more self-sufficient. Here's an idea I've come up with. Take her chair, and affix a freely rotating crank approximately 7 inches in radius to the side of it at a height which makes reaching both the top and bottom edge of it comfortable for her. The handle of the crank will be about 6 inches out from the center, and will be -- for lack of a better term yet -- a spanreed. (We'll probably want to make this spanreed more like a belaying pin in size and shape, in reality.) Put another of these spanreed-belaying pins on a similar crank in Rysn's cabin. This crank is on an axle, but is rigidly affixed to a small diameter gear. The small diameter gear is meshed with a larger diameter gear (ratio TBD for Rysn's convenience) which is, in turn, rigidly affixed to a capstan. The capstan has a line which runs vertically, with a very small weight on the end (for stability) and a number of conjoined gemstones that match the ones in her chair. The weight and gemstone plumbob should be constrained in a tube. Yes, the selective dissociation of forces means she won't move side to side if the bob swings around, but she would bob up and down as the cosine of the arc it describes. Give the crank on Rysn's chair a setting brake so she doesn't have to worry about inadvertent vertical motion, and using the power of gear ratios and conjoined gemstones, she can crank herself both up and down. If the tube is the same height as the ship, she could go all the way from the hold to the top deck under her own power. It might even make sense to run this device from the top of the Eelsnest. It should be noted that we're not using the "opposed motion" principles of Navani's archery platform. The gemstones in Rysn's chair and on the capstan line move in the same direction, not opposite. So she's not using a counterweight to lift her, she's doing it herself with her own muscle power. -Hephaestus