Mason Wheeler

Is it unpopular? I haven't seen too much support expressed for this pairing that really seems to have come out of nowhere.

Agreed. There I don't agree. While I'll admit it's been a while since I read them — last time I read anything Stormlight was when the last book came out — and it's possible there are scenes I'm forgetting, I do remember him shedding the evil clown persona and being far more sober and compassionate when talking with Shallan. Jasnah... it really depends on the scene, but he's generally a lot more serious when he's alone with her as well. With Kaladin, on the other hand...

It's worth noting that, in the Stormlight Archive at least, this is him performing his job duties. The purpose of the King's Wit is to be an offensive jester who will humiliate people that the king needs humiliated, because it would be beneath the king's dignity to do so personally.

We've got a lot of people in this thread who are from the central Utah area. For any such participants who enjoy uplifting entertainment, check out Heart + Voice. Rachel Ellingson, one of the founders of the group, is a childhood friend of mine, and they've got a new show coming up next month, put on for free at various local meetinghouses, about Alma the Younger and the Sons of Mosiah. Their previous shows have been really good, so I'm looking forward to this next one!

And it came to pass that they became exceedingly sour...

It's right there in the second stanza...

Now, if all three letters were capitalized, I would immediately think of a Byte Order Mark, which is a painful, arcane detail programmers have to be aware of when dealing with Unicode text.

Wow, I wonder what rating platypus leather would get? You may not know this, but standard cow leather is rated on its quality, and the biggest factor tends to be where the cows grew up. In lush, well-watered areas, cows have nice, soft, supple hides and often get rated A. Cows raised in harsh desert environments, on the other hand, have much poorer quality skin, and are commonly D-hide-rated!

Argentina

My first area on my mission, my companion was in the Branch Presidency. That's how I really knew I wasn't in Kansas anymore!

The problem with the second one was that it set up a third movie that cannot deliver on the promises it made. And it doesn't feel like the writers ever even realized any of this.

The first one only, please. The first Spider-Verse film was great, but the second one was really bad because the writers had no clue what they were doing, and all the cool style in the world can't save a poorly-written film.

I don't mind the babbling; it's screaming that really grates!

I liked it a lot. The Graphic Audio adaptation of Elantris, though, was abysmal, nowhere near their usual high standard of quality.

The bigger issue is people cynically exploiting this, using minorities as a shield against well-deserved criticism. You make a bad product, you put a minority front-and-center as the face of it, and then when people point out that your bad product is bad, you deflect criticism by accusing the critics of being racist/sexist/whatever. I really hope the Cosmere never ends up in the hands of Disney, or any other producers who will engage in this sort of crap! Especially given the recurring "tell" that the best way to spot a Worldhopper is their ambiguous ethnicity.

Me neither.

Again, is this Alloy of Law Steris, or later Steris? They really do seem like two distinct characters, and the latter is far more likeable than the former.

Post-Alloy of Law Steris is awesome. In the first book she was just painful. I think Brandon heard the complaints from a lot of fans about just how bad she was (and how wrong it felt for Wax to end up with her) and retooled the character for later books, because by Shadows of Self she feels like a completely different character.

Fun podcast! But I have to say, when it comes to "vexatious troll" WTCC submissions, can anyone beat mine from last year?

I know how you feel. Back in 2004, I was a student at BYU-Idaho, watching General Conference, and they announced that the new Apostles to replace Elders Haight and Maxwell, both of whom had died recently, would be Dieter F. Uchtdorf and David A. Bednar. Well, we all know what Elder Uchtdorf did for a living. We all know! But Elder Bednar's career was in education, and at the time of this conference, he was currently serving as the President of BYU-Idaho. Boy did our entire campus freak out at this news!

Yeah, that's not a direct quotation, but don't you agree that it's a pretty accurate overview of the "feel" of the first few chapters?

"I just woke up in an unfamiliar place. I don't know where I am or even who I am, but I'm able to do cool things that the normal people around me can't do. And there are people hunting me." Sure sounds like a Bourne story to me...

After reading the previews the newsletter sent out, I thought Frugal Wizard was going to be the one I liked the second-most, after Sunlit Man. Instead it turned out to be the one I enjoyed the least out of the four. The plot felt to me like a retread of more than anything. On Writing Excuses, Brandon & co. talk a lot about narrative promises. Well, the promise we got was "Jason Bourne in a medieval parallel dimension," and I really wanted to read that story. But it wasn't what we got.

I asked Brandon if Jasnah's mental illness is psychopathy. He said, "that's a very good question. RAFO."