So excited for Wisdom of Crowds next week!

Huh... Paint Tool SAI is a one-time purchase? I used it for years (between GIMP and Clip Studio Paint), presumably because it was free.

Ah. My last place had a similar extra-generous pension scheme that only about 10 people who'd been with the company 15+ years were still on. Then after we got bought out by another group those people started mysteriously showing up on redundancy lists.

Crikey. Are you guys hiring?

Agree so strongly. Amazing series but some of those middle books just have nothing happening, or rather, the same thing happening over multiple books.

Perrin and the Shaido? Mat's jaunt in Ebu Dar? The entire book (I think book 9?) where the story doesn't advance any further and it's just people reacting to what Rand did at the end of book 8?

I guess on a narrow reading of his response, what he's objecting to is that you can get the Flashback card back from exile even if it was exiled by non-Flashback means.

If there were some way of getting back only Flashback cards that are in exile because they were cast for their Flashback cost then it would be cleaner, though I guess there's no way of doing that without horrible templating and a lot of memory issues.

22

I suspect when we find out more about Kelsier-as-Thaidakar it will be a combination of two things:

*Different perspectives/goals from the protagonists in SA. As other people have pointed out, both Kelsier/Vin and Dalinar/Kaladin et al were pretty bloodthirsty in their own rights, and if there was a person like that pursuing a different goal to you - e.g. the preservation of their own planet over yours - it would be easy to see them as a villain without more context.

*Long life. By SA / era 2, Kelsier has been around for 300 years, and has likely enjoyed superhuman powers for most of that time and using them to steer the course of nations. Kelsier in FE and SH was still strongly tied to the same crew he'd grown up with. Long life doesn't suit everyone and I could easily see his motives and personality changing or warping over the course of 300 years, starting to see individual lives or even nations as expendable in an "ends justify the means" sort of way.

So useful! Is this something that lots of authors do? Couldn't count how many incomplete series I'm mid-way through and will need this sort of summary when the next book comes out...

Met in our final year of uni. I was on a fairly tame night out and one of my group didn't want to stop drinking when the bar closed at midnight, so I said I'd go with him down to the Union club night.

We got in, got drinks, then wandered the whole place to see if there was anyone there we knew. He eventually spotted a girl he thought he knew from his maths class (turned out that wasn't even how he knew her) so we joined their group.

My now wife had decided to go out to the SU that night with this friend as a lot of her circle had graduated the previous year and she was on a mission to meet new people. She thought the two guys joining their group on the dancefloor were some sort of close friends of her friend so she tracked us down and added us on Facebook the next day. Got to chatting through that.

Married four years, one year old boy, just moved house together.

The post that made me leave my local FB page was a picture of a particularly scruffy looking cat found in the local area. People commenting that it was a disgrace that the owner was clearly neglecting it.

But the standout comment was some guy, after about an hour, commenting "Any update on this poor creature? We the people have the right to know it's being properly cared for!!" At that point I realised that some people just have way too much time on their hands.

Shortly after the owner commented saying it was her cat, whose brother had just passed away (the cat's brother that is) and he'd been taking it badly and was off his food and not grooming himself as normal. Suddenly all the people who'd been baying for this woman to be reported commenting "Aww bless him, really hope he starts to feel his old self soon!"

You could definitely get some more use out of materials. Wood, clay, etc for lower ranks, steel, silver, gold, platinum, titanium for higher ranks? Switching from material to nobility titles partway through seems a bit strange, also "lord" is arguably just a type of noble, or possibly a synonym.

Alternatively: animals. Shouldn't be too hard to come up with a sequence of thirteen progressively bigger animals, right?

I can only speak for my own experience (mid-large size tech company in the UK) but my hiring manager knew what he was getting when he hired someone straight from practice: mainly a good all-round technical awareness.

And not "already knowing everything", more being aware and able to do independent reading up as needed and have an intelligent conversation about it with external advisors.

Making that jump from public to industry and realising there were companies prepared to pay me more money to work fewer hours was... a revelation.

That said, worth waiting and being selective when making that move. Most of my intake jumped ship the week our training contract finished, and of them, most had changed jobs again within a year or two. I waited a year and a half post-qualification before I moved to industry, after six months of interviews where I had quite strict criteria. But it paid off, been with the same company five years now (though I'm moving next month).

Man I once did a journey from Bordeaux to meet up with friends in Faro in the south of Portugal by several trains (four I think?) because it was the same cost as just flying to London and back out again and I thought it would be a cool adventure.

I finished the book I was reading somewhere around the Spanish border and then just sat for 10 hours as we trundled across the Spanish countryside, which all just looked incredibly similar. The night train journey to Lisbon was a little better since I was asleep. Never again, at least solo.

As a journey with friends, or if you're the kind of person who loves meeting new people and getting to know them while travelling, maybe. A friend travelled Moscow to Mongolia by train once and said it was a good experience, but still opted to just fly back afterward.

Agreed about Scarleet (and Eluards for that matter, unless the family is French?) but I can definitely think of a few English towns or boroughs called ___ Grove.

Little English towns have some fantastic names. Chipping Norton. Bishops Stortford. Waltham on the Wolds. Though if I'm being brutally honest, the name "Ecrin" doesn't strike me as an English village name (again, maybe French?)

The characters have their traits dialled up higher as the seasons go on... But what were Chandler's?

• The funny/sarcastic one - if anything this was already dialled up pretty high from the start, not much more they could do there.
• Bad with women / commitment issues - both of which had to go away by the time he's moving in with Monica and getting engaged. Only so long before that gets stale.

So the fact that the first part stayed throughout, while the commitment issues went away... Yeah he's about the only character whose trend was to grow up, especially while the others are getting dumber/ditzier/wackier around him and he's forced to play the straight guy more and more.

Just focus on the formats you're interested in and ignore the rest

Agree this is the way... But scrolling this sub during perpetual spoiler season gets really challenging! "Ooh, a new card! Wait, is this one of the sets I care about? Which one is MID again?"

AFTER TEN THOUSAND YEARS A YEAR AND A HALF, I'M FINALLY FREE!!!

The median age of the population of the world is supposedly around 30. So if you're over 30, most people are younger than you.

Hypothetically, right?

...

Hypothetically, right?

Someone standing up for calling a holiday in the UK a staycation! How refreshing, have an upvote!

Honestly as I first saw the title of your post I thought it was going to be yet another rant about how people are using that word incorrectly. Glad it's not, but also sorry your staycation is turning out a bit underwhelming.

Ok, you clearly know a decent amount about swordfighting. More than I do, that's for sure! It's always enjoyable to read a work where the author has a demonstrable knowledge of the content, be it swordfighting, or military tactics, or sailing. (I think with decent writing, an author can get away with just throwing in some terms like parry, slash, lunge, but it's nice to read something and realise the writer knows what they're talking about).

That said, maybe the fight got a bit... technical? It's a very good description of the events of the fight, literally blow by blow, but I felt it could do with a bit more tension. Some ideas:

You convey that Marrin is worried about Falkor's training and armour. But he just "has to be careful", doesn't really convey much emotion. You mention a drop of sweat, which suggests he's... a bit nervous?

Honestly from reading the fight scene I couldn't tell you exactly how worried or alarmed Marrin is about being attacked, unarmoured, by a fully armoured knight. With no prior context, based on his lack of panicking and his calm assessment of his options, I'd have to assume he's a very skilled and competent fighter. That he wins the fight without any injury whatsoever would seem to confirm that, but is that correct?

The killing strike also left me a bit surprised. Although Falkor clearly intends to kill or grievously injure Marrin, I got no clue from the fight or dialogue that Marrin was aiming to do more than disarm or incapacitate him. The description of the guided thrust into Falkor's eye sounds very deliberate though. Taken together with the fact that Marrin doesn't seem too panicked or "in the heat of the moment", and the assumption that he's a very skilled swordsman, it reads like he's cold-bloodedly killed this man.

The wide eyes in the last paragraph then seem to contradict that though.

Also, probably covered earlier in the text, but I'm assuming he's wearing some kind of gauntlets to allow him to keep grabbing the blade? Might be an idea to chuck in a "in his gauntleted left hand" or something just to remind the reader that he's not slicing his hand to shreds.

Sorry, this got quite in depth. Generally the writing was very good and I enjoyed the scene!